He made for Hecuba. Priam put himself in front of her and threw his spear. But it wouldn’t have bothered a blue-arsed fly; he’d no throwing strength left in him. Neoptolemus kicked the weapon aside with a laugh.
‘You useless old cunt!’
He took Priam by his white hair and dragged him, howling, well away from the altar. Both men slipped in the son’s blood. At the palace doors, he hacked off Priam’s head and threw it down beside his son’s. Hecuba ran up and down shrieking hysterically. Neoptolemus strode back to the altar and tore Astynax away from his nurse. He threw him at the nearest soldier.
‘You! Keep the brat safe for me. It’s off the highest tower for this lad. Lose him and I’ll fucking kill you.’
Thus the tender infant was wrenched from the bosom of his lovely-haired young nurse. And taking him by the foot, as Thetis had held his father, Achilles’ wrathful son flung the child from the battlements so that his bones were broken, and crimson death and stern fate took him at his fall.
So they say. I wasn’t there. Another of these fairytales went round that I’d murdered the kid myself, using him as a weapon with which I clubbed his grandfather to death. That would have been a first for me, if true. But I know that Neoptolemus killed Priam, and he very likely did the grandson himself. Astynax certainly went off the wall. He had to – laws of war. You can’t let them live, the sprogs of dead heroes, not if you’ve had a hand in their father’s demise. They grow up with hate in their hearts, and hate brings them after you, even if it takes years.
By this time Andromache was screeching and kneeling in front of the altar, her arms spread wide.
‘Kill me! Kill me!’
‘No fucking chance!’
Neoptolemus picked her up and threw her at another soldier.
‘Back to the ships with her! You’re destined for my bed, girl. While Hector rots in hell, I’ll be sweetly fucking his wife.’
And so Andromache is enslaved by the son of the man who had slaughtered her husband.
‘I’ve heard it said,’ she weeps, ‘that a single night takes care of any woman’s aversion to a conqueror’s bed, and that time soon cools the bedsheets of the first husband. Yet even the draughthorse, severed from his faithful friend and partner in the yoke, feels the sudden absence, grudges, and will not pull unless compelled to by the whip. And is not man higher than the poor beasts? And is not woman ever mindful of her first love?’
Well, she said something when the time came, and it might well have been words to that effect. Right now, all she did was scream. And she had a lot more to scream about – Neoptolemus hadn’t finished bathing his hands in her family’s blood. Polyxena was next on his list. Achilles had seen her fling her bracelet from the city walls to land in the scales and make up the weight in gold that would ransom her brother’s body. At that point, the hero had gone weak-kneed, the chump, and now even after he was dead and gone, he still wanted her. Only now she’d have to be his bride in the Elysian Fields.
Or so Neoptolemus had dreamed. Apparently. True? Apparently. How do you explain dreams? So she was picked out now to die later, as a sacrifice, to appease Achilles’ angry ghost and slake his limbo lust.
Cassandra was next. Little Ajax had his lecherous eye on her, and Athene’s altar didn’t even make him blink. He grabbed the girl and wrenched her away. She spat at him and tore herself free, running back to the altar. Everybody laughed.
‘Better watch that one’s claws, man, she might bite your balls off!’
Ajax flushed. ‘Not before I’ve shagged the bitch! Right in front of her fucking goddess too! I’ll enter her holy of holies all right, don’t you fucking worry!’
And he threw her to the ground.
She screamed at him that she was a virgin sworn to the gods, but he smashed his fist into the side of her face.
‘That shut you up? I don’t give a tinker’s toss for virgins. And I don’t give a fart of my arse for the gods!’
She was unconscious and bleeding when he raped her.
‘There you go, girl – some good Greek seed up your holy Trojan cunt! Do you the world of fucking good!’
Nobody applauded. Nobody even spoke. He stood up and frowned.
‘What?’
Agamemnon told him what. Later he kicked him out of the camp for blasphemy. He’d crossed the line. He’d violated a priestess on her own altar, and Agamemnon was now covering his big fat arse just in case. Added to which, he fancied Cassandra himself, ever the old Agamemnon, and as the crime had already been committed by another party, he argued, he was entitled not to let the spoils go to waste. He could claim Cassandra as his own with no guilt attached. She was no ordinary booty either, easily the most ravishing of all Priam’s daughters. A princess to die for – literally, as he later discovered when he took her back to Mycenae, not knowing what was to follow.
As for Little Ajax, his days were numbered. Very shortly he was to join Big Ajax out in the long dark – he would drown on the way home. Athene saw to that.
‘He won’t get away with it!’ she hissed all over the web. ‘Nor will the Greeks for letting him off and letting him go. Banished from the camp, indeed. Some punishment that! It was light enough to make a mockery of me. No, I’ll hit their ships. Zeus will give me the fire-power. And you, Poseidon, you will fill the sheltered straits of Euboea with drowned corpses, litter the white sands with stranded shoals of the dead.’
Poseidon went off in a gleeful rage to stir up the Aegean – nothing he liked better – and to deliver the drowned men to the shores of Myconus, the tearing reefs of Delos, Skyros, Lemnos, the headlands and ragged edges of Caphareium. And from all those barbarous-toothed edges they came together for the last time, those scattered corpses, all going down together in a ragged line to Hades, with the sea in their mouths.
Ajax had sailed off in his anger, cursing Agamemnon and all the Immortals. Had they heard him? Certainly. Poseidon had wrecked his ship, after all, and Ajax had only saved himself by clinging to a rock. And even from his rock he raged and swore, till Zeus grew tired of it and thunderbolted him where he clung and ranted. Man and rock disappeared down the sea’s white throat, never to be seen again. And that was that. This is how his war ended, and it was as close as Ajax ever got to home.
Neoptolemus didn’t wait for us. He left early with his prize, Andromache, and landed in northern Greece, conquering Molossia. He kept Andromache as his queen for seven years, then got the itch and travelled to Sparta in quest of Hermione. First he had to consult the oracle. Delphi gave him a bad answer, and instead of accepting it he demanded another. When the same answer came back, he did an Ajax – burned the shrine then marched off to Sparta and took Hermione by force. He returned via Delphi where he ran into Orestes, who killed him on the spot. They buried him under the temple he had destroyed. Like his father, he never saw Phthia again. And Hermione returned to Sparta, where she married Orestes – after he’d been punished for the murder of his mother. Confused? Confusion is an entitlement . . . and I’ll be coming to all of that. Only one thing is clear here: the killing of Neoptolemus required no act of purification. Delphi decreed that this had been no murder but an execution.
Diomedes was one of those who got back to a disloyal wife and to a kingdom that had disowned him. She’d grown tired of waiting and had taken a lover whom the people had accepted as their king – they’d grown tired too. Women and nations – they both need a leader. So Diomedes left them to themselves and sailed off with a shrug, westward to Italy, where he went on to enjoy a ripe old age and one filled with honour.
Nestor returned safely to sandy Pylos, and he too grew sleek in his old age, though so many of the younger men he’d led to Troy were quiet dust now, sleeping on its plains and shores.
Few Trojans got out alive. Antenor did – with my help, if you want to believe it. He and his wife Theano were spared during the sacking because they hung a leopard skin from their window – an emblem of my personal protection, and I saw to it that the pair of them es
caped with their family and their best possessions, all because they’d helped me steal the Palladium. In spite of the insane slaughter surrounding them, they calmly walked free.
Another good one – the likely story that Agamemnon was so touched when he saw Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, out of flaming Troy, and leading his little son by the hand, that he let them all go – Aeneas, Anchises, Ascanius and Creusa, Aeneas’s faithful wife, before he ditched her for Dido. The perfect family procession. And Agamemnon after all was the perfect family man. Or perhaps Creusa disappeared in the confusion and never made it to Mount Ida along with the others? This would leave Aeneas free to sow his illicit oats on Carthage.
Or did the perfect protector of families, having agreed to let them all pass, pick off Creusa from behind and keep her for his bed? That would be much more like the Agamemnon we all knew. But what do I know? I know what’s on the web, and I also know that the sack of Troy saw many casualties, including truth.
What really happened to Hecuba, for example? One thing’s sure, the old bird didn’t go quietly. When Agamemnon was snatching the raped Cassandra from Ajax with the holiest of motives in mind, Hecuba fairly spat her poison at him.
‘Fine – take her! And take your fill of her! But when you fuck my daughter, you fuck Apollo in the mouth! Do you think your nights will be spent so sweetly with a sacred receptacle for your stinking Greek sperm? Not that you’ll have many nights left after what you’ve done! You’re a fucking dead man!’
Or words to that effect.
Did Agamemnon waste her on the spot? According to Penelope, no – she gave her instead to Helenus (now one of us) to pacify the old crone. And he took her away, still raining down her hell-and-devastation curses on all of us. He got her as far as the Hellespont and then she dropped down dead. She’d had enough.
Enough? No, enough’s never enough, and, like the sea, storytellers will never let the dead rest, will they? Always returning to us in one form or another, like the sea giving up its dead. So the web went on from there, weaving Hecuba into a black dog baying nightly among the graves and following Hecate on witching nights. Hear how she howls, that female hound! And her mound is marked on the web, a sailor’s landmark, Cynossema, the bitch’s tomb. Maybe the dog’s a metaphor, an image of her abasement by loss and enslavement, multiple sorrows. Or maybe the soldiers stoned her to death like a dog. Maybe she cried like a dog in her grief. All I know is I heard her swearing blue murder at Agamemnon, and, if words could kill, he was dead before his time.
It all ended in quarrels. What else do you expect from war? What else would you expect from Agamemnon? He and Menelaus fell out about Ajax’s crime. Menelaus couldn’t wait to get back with his whore to Sparta, but Agamemnon wanted to stay on and allay Athene’s anger – so he said – with prolonged sacrifices and all due ceremony. In other words: as we’re here, let’s fucking plunder the entire fucking hinterland of Troy. As we’re here. We’ve sacked the city – why stop there?
Same old greed. Menelaus said they’d already made amends by stoning Ajax. That, said Agamemnon, was a fucking laugh and a half. A couple of stones had been thrown, yes, but as a formality, nothing lethal. Ajax got away with a few bruises. Most of the stones had been deliberately wide of the mark. Nobody knew that the bastard was about to be drowned anyway on his way home.
In the end, the two leaders and brothers, friends in sunshine and in shadow, agreed to leave separately, and Agamemnon eventually reached Mycenae, where a good hot bath was waiting for him – a bloodbath. Clytemnestra carried a long memory of her murdered daughter and had plotted with her lover Aegisthus to whack the murdering cunt the minute he got back. Hecuba had been right when she prophesied. He was dead already – only sooner even than any of us might have imagined.
It was all too easy. Home he came at last in conquest, home to Mycenae, soldier from the war returning, striding in victorious, his vessels laden with spoils, his concubine Cassandra by his side, his triumphant feet treading the purple cloth specially laid out for him on this day of days, the king’s causeway, the cock of the midden. Clytemnestra spread her lips in a grin. She opened her arms, and he swept into them unsuspecting, crushing the breasts that had suckled his dead daughter long since and filled her lover’s fists only minutes earlier – Aegisthus’s semen was still fresh and hot inside her. O Agamemnon, stormer of Troy, king of men, trample the deep-sea purples now and enter your palace halls . . .
The great feast was ready for him, prepared in style, juicy chines of goat, chopped and cooked just the way she knew he liked them. She’d posted a watchman on the palace roof at Argos, his duty to warn her of the exact moment the beacon flashed – the last in the chain of fires that would signal Troy’s fall and the imminent return of the Greek fleet. Countless times she’d gone out and shouted up to this lookout, ‘Watchman, watchman, what of the night?’ And this night the cry came back to her, the newsflash from the fire, thrilling her down to her pubic bone. The sea was on fire, Troy town had fallen, the walls were down. Her husband, the father and killer of their lovely girl Iphigenia, was coming home . . .
She couldn’t wait to pour the bath. But she had things to see to first. Her son Orestes was sent away to his uncle Strophius, and she kept her other two daughters, Chrysothemis and Electra, well hidden. Agamemnon had a bad track record with daughters. Clytemnestra never forgot, never forgave. She kept Aegisthus hidden too.
She had to wait, as it turned out. He was held up by a storm. But she sent out ships to scour the sea-routes and report on his schedule. By the time he finally returned, it was a hot hate that awaited him in Argos, and a huge hot dinner – after which he was so bloated he could barely stand.
His wife’s supporting arm saw to that. She did the business herself, led him to the bath, did the honours too, cupping his balls and sucking his drunken member as he wallowed and rolled . . .
‘Oh, I’ve been dreaming of that, all through the war!’
‘Really, my dear? And were you dreaming of this, I wonder?’
Stories about how he fell grow like flowers around a man’s corpse. He was bathed first and feasted afterwards, he was cut down at table, suitably stuffed. Penelope showed it the way she preferred it, with him stepping heavily out of the bath and Clytemnestra slipping over his wet head the splendid new robe she’d made for him, gorgeously embroidered with her own white hands. She’d sewn up the neck and sleeves. He struggled for a few seconds, giggling. Was it a joke, some sort of mistake?
No, no mistake. No joke either. The concealed axe comes down on his fumbling skull with a splintering crash. In the same second, Aegisthus comes in from behind, sliding through the door, sword in hand like a lethal penis, penetrating back and belly, behind and through, coming out hot and smoking, and sticking there, stopping just short of stabbing Clytemnestra, who is holding him from the front.
She lifts the axe again . . .
And again and again.
Penelope couldn’t let it go either, varying the scenes according to the stories. Aegisthus holding him down in the bath, gurgling, while Clytemnestra gives him three stab-wounds, each on account of his crimes, each calculated to disable but not to kill, not outright. The wounded man has time to drink in her words along with the crimson bubbling bathwater.
‘If you’d killed her to save our city, I could have understood – or to help our house, or even to save our other children, the one sacrificed for the sake of the many – yes, I could have understood, even forgiven, but you killed our girl to save a slut – a slut who couldn’t keep her legs closed! You killed her for a cuckold brother and for your own vanity and greed. Glutton, slut, cuckold, cunt! So then, you murdering thug, this is for Iphigenia! And this is for Helen! And here’s one for Cassandra, your holy whore!’
The bath runs red as he bleeds. Agamemnon burbles, gurgles.
‘And when you ran the slut to earth, when she spread her desperate legs for Menelaus, did you all take turns? How many of you fuckpigs fucked her first? She was well rape
d, they say. But she always did like a ring of stiff pricks around her, the filthy bitch! And I’ll bet you fucked with the best of them, you disloyal bastard!’
Agamemnon makes a dying effort, rising weakly from the reddened water as his strength ebbs, his belly bubbling and sounding like a whale. She seizes the cock and slices it off, stuffing it in his mouth.
‘There you go! That’s as much as your Trojan whore will get from you tonight. And she’s next for the chop.’
She leaves the room, axe in hand.
Enough then?
No, still no, still it goes on, the endless weaving, the versions of what is true and untrue and just possibly true. Let him stand up unharmed, go out and arrive all over again, entering his hall for a third time, not in history, but in art – Penelope’s triptych. Here he comes once more. Clytemnestra watches his fatal entrance under her battlements.
‘Look! Look at the bastard! See how he struts!’
Behind him stretches the sea, infinitely gentle, infinitely cruel. He has put it behind him now, that vast factory of purple. Or so he thinks. Clytemnestra stares at it through eyes that flash and flood.
‘I’d have traded all of it, the whole ocean with all its purple dyes, the wine-dark sea and all its hidden riches, for the life of my daughter. But he wouldn’t give her to me. And now I’ll make him remember. How I begged . . .’
He is naked, ready for the bath. Three times she strikes him: the first time with the axe they use to butcher the bull or the boar in his prime. The blade sinks deep into the soft fat flesh between the shoulders and the neck, opening him up, a startling gash, gaping, like a red mouth. This is followed by two strokes of the sword – first in the belly to make him bellow in his agony and anger, surprised like the beast by the sudden betrayal, and then the thanksgiving stroke to the heart in the name of Hades. She sends her husband to hell with the life pumping out of him in three places, frightening, fast.
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