Ransom

by David Malouf

  ‘Then, my dear,’ and his voice quickens, ‘it is no longer night. And this time, when I look behind me, what is glowing out from under the coverlet, under the wickerwork canopy, is the body of my son Hector, all his limbs newly restored and shining, restored and ransomed. And that is it,’ he whispers before she can protest out of the stricken face she has turned upon him, ‘that is what I intend to do. To go today, immediately, to Achilles, just as I saw myself in my dream, plainly dressed and with no attendant but a driver for the cart – not as a king but as an ordinary man, a father, and offer him a ransom, and in the sight of the gods, who must surely look down in pity on me, beg him humbly, on my knees if that is what it comes to, to give me back the body of my son.’

  His voice breaks and he turns quickly away. He dares not meet her look. When he does at last, Hecuba, her eyes narrowed, is still staring at him.

  She nods her head. Rapidly. She is, he knows, controlling herself. He must be strong now. He has always been afraid of this controlled rage in her.

  ‘And you expect him to do it?’ she hisses. The scorn in her voice is withering. ‘You expect that… jackal, that noble bully, to be moved by this touching pantomime?’

  She gets up and begins to stride about. The lamp flickers in the air she stirs up, as, small, straight, furious, she passes back and forth before him.

  ‘When Hector accepted Achilles’ challenge and very courteously offered him terms of combat – to allow no insult to Achilles’ body if he prevailed but to give it over, in the time-honoured way, to be dealt with as the gods demand – what did the man do? He rejected the offer with contempt, and when Hector –’ she paused, unable to speak the word – ‘when victory went to the Greek, he let his henchmen loose on my dear son’s body, and twenty times over, one after another, they plunged their daggers into his flesh. Why? For what reason? To vent their spite on him, the cowards, for being what Achilles will never be, a man with no blemish on his soul, shining pure before the gods. He tied Hector’s feet to the axlebar of his chariot, a thing unheard of, and dragged his body in the dust. And you expect this wolf, this violator of every law of gods and men, to take the gift you hold out to him and act like a man?’

  ‘I do not expect it,’ Priam says quietly. ‘I believe it is possible. I believe –’ and he is astonished at the enormity of the thought he is expressing, he whose whole life has been guided by what is established and conventional – surely, he thinks, it is a goddess who is speaking through me. ‘I believe,’ he says, ‘that the thing that is needed to cut this knot we are all tied in is something that has never before been done or thought of. Something impossible. Something new.’

  She composes herself, hoods her eyes and sits. The assurance with which he has spoken, the quietness that has spread around them, makes her wary: she must not cross him. But the danger of what he is determined on fills her with alarm. She will need all her wiles, all her powers of firm but calm persuasion, to lead him back from it.

  ‘But you would never get there,’ she whispers.

  ‘Some swaggering lout among the Greeks would strike you down before you got even halfway to the camp. Think of it. Two old men in a cart laden with gold? Do you suppose your grey hairs would save you?’

  ‘No,’ he admits. ‘But the gods might. If it was their intention that I get there.’

  ‘Priam, Priam,’ she sighs, and again takes his hand. ‘This is folly.’

  ‘It is, yes. I know. But what seems foolish is just what is most sensible sometimes. The fact that it has never been done, that it is novel, unthinkable – except that I have thought of it – is just what makes me believe it should be attempted. It is possible because it is not possible. And because it is simple. Why do we think always that the simple thing is beneath us? Because we are kings? What I do is what any man might do.’

  ‘But you are not any man.’

  ‘That’s true. In one way I’m not. But in another, deeper way, I am. I feel a kind of freedom in that. It’s a feeling I like, it appeals to me. And perhaps, because it is unexpected, it may appeal to him too: the chance to break free of the obligation of being always the hero, as I am expected always to be the king. To take on the lighter bond of being simply a man. Perhaps that is the real gift I have to bring him. Perhaps that is the ransom.’

  Hecuba shakes her head. ‘And if you too are lost? Who will stand by me in what we know is to come? Because we know, both of us, what that is, and can speak of it here where there is no one else to hear it. Just ourselves and the gods.’

  Her voice has fallen to the merest breath. The flame of the lamp, too, gutters and falls.

  ‘Who will share this weight of sorrow that is coming to us? And when my spirit fails, who will lend me the hand of comfort as you do now, my dear one? Who will keep Troy, our beloved city, alive with at least a semblance of the old neighbourliness and order if its great centre and source is gone?’

  They sit in silence now, her hand in his. They have spoken of these things before. Quietly, soberly. They are two old people consulting together, seeking comfort in one another’s presence. Two children holding hands in the dark.

  ‘Am I being selfish?’ she asks at length.

  But the question is to herself and he has no answer. His voice too when he replies is no more than a breath.

  ‘If I do not succeed in this, and am lost, then all is lost. We must leave that to the gods. Or to chance.’

  There! – and a little shiver goes through him – he has said it.

  Chance?

  She looks up quickly. Surely she has misheard.

  ‘It seems to me,’ he says, almost dreamily, ‘that there might be another way of naming what we call fortune and attribute to the will, or the whim, of the gods. Which offers a kind of opening. The opportunity to act for ourselves. To try something that might force events into a different course.’

  She wishes she had misheard. Words are powerful. They too can be the agents of what is new, of what is conceivable and can be thought and let loose upon the world. That Priam of all men should say such things – he who has always been so observant of what is established and lawful – makes her wonder now if his wits are not unstrung. She needs time. She needs the help of her sons.

  ‘Listen, my dear, this plan of yours, if you really mean to go through with it, should be put to our sons, to Helenus and the rest, in council. That is the proper course.’ She allows herself a moment’s pause. ‘As for this other matter –’ she cannot bring herself to use his word – ‘this idea you’re so taken with, of how and why things happen as they do, that is not to be spoken of. Imagine what it would lead to, what would be permitted. The randomness, the violence. Imagine the panic it would spread. You must, I beg you, keep that strictly to yourself. Now, I will go and give orders to have a fire set under the cauldron and water heated for your bath,’ and she steps swiftly to the door and calls a servant. Priam meanwhile, dreamily absorbed, continues to sit upright on the edge of the bed. When she returns he is still sitting.

  ‘My dear,’ she says, ‘what is it? What more?’ She is dry-eyed, intent, efficient. She has her own plan now to forestall him.

  ‘Hecuba,’ he begins, ‘there is something else I want you to hear. Something that till now I have never spoken of in all the many intimate hours we have spent together. Even to you, my dear, who know all my doubts and foibles, and little shameful anxieties and fears. Not because I wanted to be secretive – you of all people know I am not – and anyway, you have your own sweet ways of getting around me, so what would be the use? I have not spoken of these things because I did not know how to. How even to begin.’

  He shakes his head, slowly shakes it again, then, composing himself, takes Hecuba’s small hand and holds it close to his breast. She responds with an answering pressure of her own. She is sensitive to the slightest shades in him, but he is odd today – she has no idea where all this is leading.

  ‘You know my story,’ he says softly. ‘You must have heard it a hundred times as
a child in your father’s palace, away there in Phrygia, long before you knew that one day you would make the journey here and be my bride.’ He smiles at this: the thought comforts him. It is a fact of such long standing, a story now in itself. ‘I wonder what you thought of it, and of me. Perhaps even then your heart was touched, and what you felt then, as a mere girl, has led to this lifetime we have spent – very lovingly, I think – in one another’s company.’

  He raises her hand to his lips, meeting her concentrated, soft-eyed gaze, and glimpsing in it, as from afar, the child he has just evoked: frowning, half-fearful, hanging on the story at whose midpoint his own small life was suspended.

  ‘Well, it’s a tale every child knows and has heard a hundred times over, from his nurse at bedtime or from some weaver of magic in the marketplace. The beginning. The long-drawn-out and terrifying business of its middle. Then all in an instant – in what is always a surprise, even when the listener knows already what is to come – the turnabout, the happy end. However often he may have heard it the listener sits breathless, his small soul hanging on a breath. In just a moment a miracle will occur, and the little victim, the lost one – me in this case – will be snatched up and happily restored.

  ‘Imagine, then, what it was like to be that child. To actually stand as I did at the centre of it, of what was not a story, not yet, but a real happening, all noise and smoke and panicky confusion. To know nothing of what is to come and simply be there – one of a horde of wailing infants, some no more than three or four years old, who have been driven like geese out of the blazing citadel, along with rats, mice and a dozen other small, terrified creatures, all squealing underfoot. A rabble of filthy, lice-ridden brats with the mark of the whip across their shoulders, the spawn of beggars, pedlars, scullery maids, stablehands, whores. And smuggled in among them, whimpering and pale, a few little pampered lords such as I was, who’d seen their parents slaughtered, and their brothers laid out with their white throats slashed. All hiding now – smeared with shit to disguise the scent of sweet herbs on their skin – among all those others. Utterly bewildered like them, and waiting, too tired and hungry to be properly afraid, for some bully to come swaggering up, all matted hair and sweat, who has grown tired of slitting bellies and smashing skulls and is ready now for a little harmless fun. Ready to amuse himself by poking ribs, and pushing his thick finger into a mouth, and carrying off this or that one of us to be his slave and plaything, his prize of war.

  ‘We huddle in groups, half-asleep on our feet. The air’s an oven thick with smoke. It’s past midday. Since the slaughter began, just after dawn, not a drop of water has passed our lips.

  ‘Some of the smallest among us are blubbering snot and crying for their mothers. Others are too stunned to do more than squat in their own filth. We cling together, all grimed with ashes and streaked with the dried blood of whoever it was, a parent or some kindly neighbour, whose arms we were snatched from. Waiting in the open now for the men whose voices we can hear, in a great roar up there in the city, to descend like wolves and carry us off.

  ‘A group of guards has been set to watch us. They are idle fellows, some of them bloodied and in bandages, all of them terrifying to a child who has never known any but men whose every move is a response to the fulfilling of his needs. Their rough voices, their hands, their red mouths scare me. They range round the edges of the crowd, pushing and shouting. Even more frightful, when they produce them, are their grins.

  ‘Occasionally, out of boredom, or the need for a moment’s savage amusement, they toss handfuls of crusts into the crowd, and laugh as the boldest or most desperate of the mob of hungry, half-naked urchins fall upon them, scrabbling in the dirt and lashing out with knuckles and bare feet, howling, biting, gouging. The men holler and urge them on. But when their charges threaten to do one another serious mischief – we are, after all, the property of their masters and not to be damaged – they wade in, all fists themselves, and kick the little combatants to their feet, or haul them up by their hair or the scruff of the neck, holding them like polecats at arm’s distance, wary of teeth, then pitch them back into the mob.

  ‘And I am one of these snivelling barefoot brats. Six years old and indistinguishable, I hope – my survival depends on it – from the offspring of the lowest scullion. I have just enough sense of the danger I am in to make myself small so as not to attract attention. Some of those I am hiding among are palace slaves. Any one of them might point a finger and name me. Others again, just yesterday, were my playmates, little lords of all the world as I was. We avoid one another now. Turn our eyes away. Put the surging crowd between us.

  ‘Imagine! To be at one moment the little pampered darling of your father’s court, never more than twenty paces from your nurse or some watchful steward, the pet of your mother’s maidservants – big girls with golden half-moons or butterflies in their ears that I liked to snatch at and jingle – and of slaves who had to approach me on their knees, even when all they were doing was offering a pile of shelled walnuts on a silver salver or a bowl to receive my tinkling piss. With a skin that had never known the touch of any but the finest cotton or silk, and in winter a lambswool undershirt. The possessor of a sleek bay pony, and a pet rabbit, and a wicker cage the size of my fist with a cricket in it to drum and chirp beside my pillow. To be at one moment Podarces, son of Laomedon, King of Troy, and in the next just one of a rabble of slave children, with a smell on me that I had taken till then to be the smell of another order of beings. A foul slave-smell that I clung to now in the hope that it would cling to me, since it was the only thing that could save me from drowning like my brothers, up there in the citadel, in my own blood.’

  He sits, shaking his head. All this is so shameful, has for so long been secret in him. When he speaks again it is in a voice she barely knows.

  ‘Leading away from the town, and from the place below it where we stand waiting in the dust, is a road, narrow, white, winding off across the plain, dwindling away into smoky haze. It looks quiet. It is empty as yet. I stand looking at it. That road leads to slavery – that’s what I tell myself. It’s the road he will drag me down. Slung across his shoulders like a sheep.

  ‘I look up now and I can still see it. It’s the road my other self went down. To a life where you and I, my dear, have never met, have never found one another. To a life I have lived entirely without you. In the same body perhaps,’ he holds up his arm, ‘with the same loose skin, the same ache in the knee-joints and thumbs. But one that for sixty years has known only drudgery and daily humiliation and blows. And that life too, I have lived, if only in a ghostly way. As a foul-smelling mockery of this one, that at any moment can rise to my nostrils and pluck at my robe and whisper, So there you are, old man Podarces.

  ‘There are things,’ he says, almost under his breath, ‘that once we have touched them, once they have touched us, we can never throw off, however much we scrub away at ourselves, however high the gods set us. In our nostrils the stench is still there, the old filth sticks. The smell of those others – which was my smell too, the smell of the slave’s life I was being dragged away to – I can never rub off.

  ‘Sometimes late at night when I am sliding towards sleep, and in broad daylight too if I have been standing too long at some official ceremony, and the voice of my herald, Idaeus, has become a far-off drone in my ears like the buzzing of flies drunk on blood, it will be all around me. Foul, close, so thick it’s a wonder that others don’t hold their noses and turn away. And I am back there in the very midst of it, looking down that white-dust road into another life. And it means nothing, that other story. In this one the miraculous turnabout has never happened. I am just one more slave-thing like the rest, one among many. I look at my blackened hands and feet, the rags I am dressed in, and know that I have no more weight in the world than the droppings of the lowest beggar or street-sweeper. All I was promised by the poets of my father’s court when they named my ancestors and sang of their high dealings with the gods, all the
gods themselves promised, has been struck out, cancelled, and the little lord of all the pleasures I had taken myself to be, Podarces, son of Laomedon, is as dead as if he had choked on a sop of wine-soaked poppy-cake, or one of those sweat-stained butchers had cut his throat up there along with the rest of his brothers, and he had sat down astonished on the palace floor and watched his rare blood spread out across the pavement and drain away into a sluice.

  ‘I take comfort from the others. Some of them are whimpering, but for the most part they are resigned. They’ve taken resignation in with their mother’s milk. Misery is all they know, it’s what they were born to. I resign myself. I let my old name go, since to speak it or hear it spoken would be death. I let it go, and with it that odd, old-fashioned little fellow it was tied to, who has choked on his bit of wine-soaked poppy-cake and been reborn as No One, and is waiting now, along with the rest, to be dragged out of the crowd and claimed and heard no more of.

  ‘And then it happens. A breath, not my own, betrays me. “Podarces,” it whispers, and I see peering in at me the black eyes of my sister, Hesione. When I shake my head and shrink back she speaks again. Louder this time.

  ‘“Podarces!”

  ‘Is she mad? Doesn’t she realise?

  ‘Because he is at her side, hulking and dark. Bareheaded but still fully armed. His leather cuirass stained with sweat, his body pouring forth the stink of his terrible exertions. Heracles, our father’s enemy. The others know him too, and draw back. I am left alone under his gaze.

  ‘It will happen now, I tell myself. Doesn’t she realise? I close my eyes, hold my breath.

  ‘But the hero laughs. He is in a mood, it seems, to be amused.

  ‘“That thing?” he says. His voice is full of scorn. “You choose that? In the gods’ name, why?”