Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  Rape is the constant. If you’re a seafarer or a warfarer or both, rape is inevitable. The sea is female. Thalassa. She’s there to be raped by all and sundry. For the soldier, cities exist to be raped. It’s what they’re for. They’re spread out for it, in the sun, always waiting, always expectant, in some cases maybe even half hopeful. Rape is better than routine, isn’t it? The barbarism of war better than the boredom of peace. Not that I’ve ever heard that confirmed by any particular female in any city I’ve ever taken. Still, it’s a theory, one to which I will return.

  Sacker of Cities is a euphemism, by the way. I’d prefer Raper of Cities. It was my profession and it’s closer to the mark.

  How do you rape a city?

  In much the same way as you rape a woman. You can take her by sudden storm, by slow siege or by stratagem. You knock down the city walls or you starve the motherfuckers out. If the first two fail, then you use deception. And deception usually takes one or both of two forms: somebody on the outside pissing in, or somebody on the inside pissing out: traitors, mercenaries, spies. A wooden horse is not an option. In the end, we had to employ the usual forms of deception. It wasn’t the old heroic way, the Achilles way, but by that time his opinions were ash. As was he. Sometimes you have to take the only way that’s left to you.

  We did try siege tactics at Troy. You wouldn’t believe how we tried. We tried for ages. But in the first year we found out, to our underdog cost, that strategically it was impossible to encircle the city and cut off access to the outside world. The Trojans’ allies were everywhere. Eastward, they were invincible; they had too long an arm – it stretched all the way out among the sand-niggers and the Habeebs and even further, past the ragheads and the razor-faces to the ends of the earth. Out of our element. We abandoned the blockade and had a go at assaulting the walls.

  Another clusterfuck. As a result of which we suffered heavy losses on the first effort and even worse ones on subsequent attempts that should never have been made. The outer walls’ palisades and trenches were just too wide to traverse, and Agamemnon’s skull just too thick to get it. Even a horse couldn’t fucking jump them, and they were deep enough to trap you, allowing the blackheads ample opportunity to use you for target practice once you were in the pit. That’s if the fall hadn’t disabled you anyway. Or if you hadn’t been impaled.

  All this meant you couldn’t bring siege-towers or rams up to the walls – only to the gates, where the Troads themselves needed access. And the gates were defended by monumental towers that rained down Hades, absolute fucking demolition: arrows, spears, tree-trunks, boulders, beams, jagged rocks, monolithic slabs, raw sewage. And if that didn’t dampen your ardour, boiling hot pitch – annihilation in a fucking bucket. One time they even threw down a lion, and the bastard beast ripped the shit out of the nearest tower-tossers before it could be speared. The Scaean Gate was the gate of fucking hell. And that’s exactly where every soldier went who tried to storm it. Troy could not be taken by force. We settled down to a long war of occupation.

  Which suited us just about as sweetly as a snake up the arse when you’ve just sat down on the old desert lily. We were used to being on the go. We were movers and shakers, sea-strikers. We made love to our hulls, and the old wine-dark sea was our element. We had the barbarian spirit and were short on patience. The plains of Troy were not for us, even when they were windy and raged like the ocean. For much of the year, they were just soggy, and there’s not much the soldier enjoys more than a war against mud and malaria. If we’d really spent as many years in the Troad as Penelope heroically totted up for us, subject to its sweltering summers and its freezing fucking winters, we’d have been decimated by disease and the blackheads would have picked us off like fish in a pool.

  The reality? The reality on the ground was this. There never was a siege of Troy. It was a war of occupation and raids, and the number of pitched battles could be counted on your two hands, even allowing for loss and for however few fingers the frostbite had left you with. The so-called war in Troy was a low-key affair, consisting mainly of attacks with incidental civilian casualties and of attacks on civilians directly and deliberately – killing them, robbing them, raping them, abducting them, doing burnjobs on their houses and making their women do blowjobs on the conquerors.

  We did all this at our leisure. Within spitting distance of Troy there were nearly thirty towns which had no special protection. Not that they had anything special to offer. But they had plenty of everyday materials, including women. And Anatolian women were inexhaustibly sweet in every conceivable way – literally. In fucking and conceiving, those women easily outmatched ours.

  And yes, added to that, there was a hinterland to die for, as many did: grain-fields, pastures, cattle, rivers and streams, sheep and goats, woods thick with deer, seas leaping with fish. Worth occupying? Fuck yes, worth a war. Only not forever, for fuck’s sake. Not for years and years. No war’s worth that.

  Years. A year is a long time when you can expect to be dead at thirty. And when any woman would have dropped her sprogs at twelve and be grandmothering their rug rats in her twenties. You can’t trifle with the years. There were ten of them on the web. And that was only the actual duration of Penelope’s war. Add to that ten years’ military preparation, and it’s impressive and epic. It’s also preposterous. Twenty years on, and Helen herself would have been long dead. And if not dead, then she’d have been a fucking gronk and not worth fighting for. Picture it: crow’s feet, claw hands, toad skin, ash hair. A gronk. And if she’d bared her breasts to Menelaus after that stretch of time, god only knows what sagging ruins would have flopped out in his face to make him wonder why he’d bothered. He’d have told her to keep them. He’d have told the blackheads to keep her too, and turned his back on Troy. But he’d have been dead himself by then in any case. We all would. Penelope built the war large and long about us and undoubtedly did us proud. But if Troy had been true, it wouldn’t have been our epic, it would have been our tomb.

  War’s a weird thing, though. There’s a lot of talk about the realities of war, but there are times, especially in the hottest heart of a battle, when you’re really under fire, that the unreality hits you, as if you weren’t really there, somebody else is, some other fucker has climbed inside your skin and is slugging it out, using your carcass as an agency of attack and defence. You’re there, but you’re not there. And that’s freakish. It’s surreal. Sometimes Penelope gets it whole. Sometimes it’s the actual unreality of the web that makes it so real.

  There are certain things you’ll never get from it. Two things in particular – there’s no sound, and there’s no smell. Nothing can recreate the hell that went on in your ears when the fighting got really feral – the screaming of orders barely understood, the shrieking of wounded and dying men, the whoops and war-cries, the high strident clash of arms that scarred the sky with splinters.

  And the stench. Even the cunningest hand of a woman at the loom can’t convey the whiff of war. You don’t even need a battle for that. The camp stank. After you’ve been slaughtering beasts for a year in the same place, that place will never smell the same again, not if Poseidon himself hurls the whole ocean over it. The tide recedes and still the ground is greasy with death. You wash away the animal shit but the stink stays. It stays because it’s not just the stink of faeces, it’s the stink of fear, dumb beasts crapping themselves when they smell what’s coming. Soldiers shit themselves too, but the excrement of men has a different smell. And off the field, away from the smell of death and terror, there’s still the other stench, the inexorable eternal stench, wicked, mature, overripe, blowing over you all day from the open latrines.

  ‘Hey, fill in those fucking crappers, will you? We’re breathing in gas fucking gangrene over here!’

  ‘No fucking point, lads, you’ll have to stomach it – it’s just the Big Motherfucker farting again!’

  ‘Up his arse, Thersites!’

  ‘Hooah, shitmate! Go on, give us your fucking number
!’

  Thersites again, speaking for the poor sodding squaddie who ate beans and barley, not cuts of roast, and who drank piss for wine. Probably his own. They were scum and they stayed scum, washing their blackened carcasses in the scurf of the sea, not in bronze baths. No handmaidenly caresses for them, no white aristocratic fingers lathering their balls and lingering on the job. These poor sods wouldn’t have known what to do with a chair other than burn it and keep warm. They sat their arses on the cold ground and got piles, and in the brass monkeys weather, all through the freezing fucking nights, they slept beneath their shields, if they were lucky enough to have any, while we hunched up snug under our rugs and fleeces. Their horny feet were black and bare; if any of them wore sandals, they were made of dried shit and fell apart in the first rains. And for sex they wanked – if they were choosy. If they weren’t so choosy, they went to Camp Syphilis and took their chances with the whores and gronks. They dug the shitters, shat them up, and filled them in. They hewed wood and drew water. Then they went out into the field without armour and got shot to pieces. They had no life. A horse had a better life in the Greek army. And these were the poor bastards Thersites spoke for, the old contemptibles.

  Sometimes they looked up at the sun. Helios, clothed in gold, rolled over them day after day, month by month, season after season. He had nothing to do but draw time behind him at his unvarying pace, serene in the pure blue, the emptiness, above and beyond the black agonies of camp and field.

  ‘Lucky fucking cunt!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The fucking sun.’

  Helios heard it and burst into golden laughter, rolled slowly on. He was in no hurry.

  Down below, rats ran among us, attracting the flies and the fleas. Some seasons dysentery paid us a visit. Soldiers lay down with it and never got up again. They shat their way straight to Hades. When the wind blew towards the town, the citizens shut their shutters and burned fragrant firewood. They were all right, they were snug. We lay low and exposed in the bog and suffered it.

  The dog days were hell too, and every cunt wanted to be cold and wet again. Shivering’s better than itching, they said. At least you can keep warm in the field. You can always go out and fight. And that’s about your only option. That’s the useless thing about long wars, the shortage of options.

  And then right on top of all that came just what we needed. Just what every army needs to cap the crap – the fucking plague.

  FIFTEEN

  The gods were to blame for it. Of course they were. In times of catastrophe on a vast scale, people always blame the gods. It gives them a reason to believe in them. On this occasion, though, they gave the old story a popular twist. Why were the gods pissed off? Aga-fucking-memnon. Rumour had it Apollo was angered by the Chief Motherfucker’s scandalous handling of the Chryses–Chryseis affair.

  Here’s how it happened. After her abduction, Chryseis became Agamemnon’s bed-slave, and after a while her father Chryses came to the camp to request her release. She was part of the spoils of war, and in normal circumstances he could have expected rightly to be told to sod off. Except that in this case the father just happened to be the priest of Apollo, and he arrived with all the paraphernalia of office, the sacred garland and golden staff, together with a whacking great ransom and in all reasonableness of spirit. Armed with all this, he begged Agamemnon to let his daughter go. In return, he said he’d put a special word in Apollo’s ear for Troy to fall to the Greeks – this made him a Trojan traitor, useful to us – and for Agamemnon himself to get back safe to Argos. And soon.

  Old Chryses’ request generated spontaneous applause. Approved by all. Here was a priest who had the ear of Apollo and could turn the divine tide in our favour. By this time, we’d been dug in for fuck knows how long, but it had been long enough, a long and bloody war of occupation with nothing achieved except a heavy loss of life on both sides – not our sort of war. The men were sick of it. They wanted to go home. Chryses’ offer gave them a chance. It was a dazzling ransom, and the old boy was, after all, a priest as well as a father and deserved respect.

  He got fuck all from that motherfucking cunt masquerading as our leader. The moron told him to sod off and die, and if he ever came back he’d personally strangle him with his god’s garland and stuff his holy staff up his arse.

  That was just for starters. It went on from there.

  ‘Don’t let me catch you fucking skulking about the ships again, cringing for support, attempting to demoralise the men, undermining me, I know what you’re at! You can just get back to your holy mumbo fucking jumbo, where you belong. A stupid stick and a few fucking ribbons won’t help you. This is a war, not a religious debate!’

  Enough? You’d think so. But no, not enough for Agamemnon.

  ‘As for your daughter, you can forget her. You’ve seen the last of her, old man. The loom and my lust are her future, a slave to both, got it? She’ll grow old in Argos, a long way from here. That’s after she’s done satisfying me in bed. And that’ll take a while, believe me. By the time I’m done with her there’s nothing she won’t know. I’ll educate the bitch. And she’ll never see her native land again, not you, not any of her loved ones. Clear? It fucking better be, because that’s it. So you can sling your hook, you old cunt, and you’ll be dogmeat if you don’t!’

  Verbatim. Difficult to credit, and a disgraceful way to speak to a priest and a suppliant. But that’s exactly what you expected from Agamemnon and it’s what you got. Not a brain in his fucking head.

  Look at him now, the poor old man.

  After leaving the Greek camp, he slides silently away, terrified for his life at first, picturing his beloved daughter brutalised in the bed of a boor, washing his household’s clothes, lugging water from the well, a slave to the shuttle and the loom to the end of her days, far from her native land. When he is clear of the camp, his tears and fears turn to fury and he wanders along the long thundering shore, where the sea’s harsh breathing strikes his ears, the crash of breakers and the suck and drag of shingle on the long lonely unlovely beach. The sea, as always, seems to render all human speech irrelevant, but being a priest he lifts his wet face to the clouds and prays loud, long and hard for vengeance.

  ‘Apollo, son of Leto of the lovely locks, I beg you now, let those Greeks pay for my tears. And for my daughter’s shame let them indemnify with your arrows!’

  Apollo hears him and speeds down from Olympus with anger in his heart and arrows on his back. In the Greek camp, some of the soldiers swear they can hear the deadly arrows clang and rattle in the god’s quiver, and his coming is like the coming of the dark, because what he brings is exactly what Chryses has asked for, what men fear the most, and what his arrows represent: death by plague.

  Apollo stands above the Greek camp and lets fly, loosing the lethal hail of poisoned darts. He starts with the mules and the dogs, then he turns on the men themselves. He cuts them to pieces, his arrows raking the ships. For nine days and nights the missiles rain down on the camp, and the stench of dead Greeks goes up to high heaven. A second camp rises up along the beaches, a camp of dead men on their pyres, the flames aspiring to the stars, and each night they blaze over the sea, turning it to liquid fire.

  By the tenth day Achilles had had enough – we all had – and called a meeting of the generals. At the meeting, he asked Calchas to explain what was happening. As our resident seer, Calchas saw to the squaddies’ spiritual needs. It’s sometimes helpful for soldiers to know they’ve got gods on their side. It’s certainly useful to generals to be assured of approval for their wars, approval on the highest level. Or to be advised instead that something has fucked up. In this instance, it didn’t take a prophet to announce that. Calchas announced it all the same.

  Under protection from Achilles, he let Agamemnon have it. He, Agamemnon, was the cause of the plague, he was the reason our army was dying. As our leader, he had shown himself to be incompetent and insensitive to say the least, and that was putting it mildly. He had
grossly insulted the priest of Apollo, and the long and the short of it was that the lovely Chryseis would have to be given back to her father. Without question, without delay, and without ransom either. The chance for that had long passed. That was the deal.

  Agamemnon erupted. ‘You cunt! Always you, Calchas, always fucking you, you fucking godfreak! You’ve never had a good word for me, always undermining my authority. At Aulis it was Iphigenia who had to die, on your testimony. And my name is fucking mud now with my wife after that affair. You’ve never seen anything ahead but bad. Mostly you’ve seen fuck all – for a so-called seer!’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with it,’ said Calchas. ‘As usual you’re trying to twist the argument away from what’s in front of us. In the first place you’ve refused a perfectly reasonable ransom –’

  ‘I was well within my rights and I still am. I refused the ransom because I didn’t want to give the girl up. I still don’t. Why should I? She’s mine. I fucking won her. And I intend to take her back home with me to Argos.’

  ‘Where, as you say, you have a wife waiting for you.’ Achilles was on his feet.

  Agamemnon rounded on him, spitting fury. ‘If you want to know, she’s ten times better in bed than Clytemnestra!’

  ‘Even as an unwilling partner?’

  ‘All the better! I don’t mind admitting it, a hundred fucking times better. And I’m not the first soldier to prefer a bed-slave to a wife, am I? But if that’s the way the wind’s blowing, so be it, the girl can go back to her father. It’s agreed. Except for one thing. I won’t give her up without compensation, I’m making that clear right here and now.’

  Achilles spoke quietly, coldly. ‘What compensation do you have in mind?’