‘Yes--’ he held her stare unflinching ‘--it will break his heart.’ For a time there was only the sound of water pouring between the rocks. When he saw that she had not moved, Paris sat down on the bench in the myrtle arbour. Like a man suddenly exhausted, he rested his elbows on his knees and held his head between his hands. Hoarsely he said, ‘It is the madness of Aphrodite. Lady, I have loved you since long before I came to Sparta. It is for love of you I came.’
She heard him at last. She heard the finality of his utterance. She heard its truth. But her will was protesting still. Bewildered, she reached for reason. ‘How could you love me? You hadn’t even seen me. You didn’t know me. It’s not me you loved but some fantastic dream inside your head.’
‘You were the dream inside my head. The goddess put you there, and when she first whispered your name to me I knew you for my fate. The heart knows such things. And now that I’ve met you it’s no longer a dream.’
For a moment she was held there, gripped by his eyes. She knew that it was imperative to turn now and walk away. She turned.
He whispered. ‘Lady, you have been promised to me since the dawn of time. A whole world is turning on this moment.’
Her back was to him, and when she spoke, her voice was barely more than a murmur, as though it did not matter whether he heard or not. ‘My world is here. I belong here, with the husband I love.’
He nodded, smiling as though in sympathy. ‘I have watched you together and for a time I thought the love between you was such that the goddess must have misled me. Yet you have shown me otherwise.’
She rounded on him. ‘How so?’
‘Because there was more passion in the blows you gave me than ever you showed him. That was why I laughed -- not to mock you, or out of crazy folly, but for the simple joy of knowing that you would never have struck me like that if I did not trouble your soul. I think you know me, lady. I think you knew me from the first moment we looked at each other. I think that you have begun to feel the madness of the goddess too.’
He had got up from the bench as he was speaking and taken two steps towards her. Helen backed away at his approach, but she had seen that what she had thought was arrogance might simply be a certainty so clear that it might be taken for a form of innocence.
‘If there was passion there,’ she said, ‘it was no more than righteous anger. You have no right to invade my life like this.’
He said quietly, ‘And if that life is finished? You can’t go back to it now, not as it was. Menelaus is gone and there is no safety. Look for it again with him, and you will find only a tedium of years in which to wonder what might have happened if you had responded when the goddess called. There is a new life waiting for you. The life you have kept in hiding. Be brave and let it be.’
The terror of the words he uttered, the scent from the damask roses and the myrtle boughs, the narcotic whirr of the crickets in the heat of the afternoon, and the splash of water breaking from the rock -- all these swirled inside her like the presence of a god. Helen turned her gaze to look where Aphrodite shamelessly dressed her hair, bare-breasted, the folds of her gown fallen about her hips, careless of everything but the sensual pulse of life delivered over into love. How many times had she studied that statue, restlessly aware that life must have more to offer than the repeated ceremonies of her daily round, the comforts of an undemanding role, and the easy sigh of satisfaction with which Menelaus consummated each swift and grateful act of love? But she had revered chaste Artemis when she was a girl, and now, as wife and queen, she honoured Hera and Athena. She told herself that it was better to choose Hera’s bounteous ears of wheat, or Athena’s loaded olive-trees, over the thorny roses of the Golden One. Better to resist the claims of passion than be swept away as its victim. Yet it was she who had placed this statue here.
And he was dismantling the world around her.
Helen shook her head. What was this mad Trojan asking of her? Could he really imagine that she would put all her life at risk for the sake of his devastating smile and these extravagant professions of immortal love? Was he anything more than a younger, more personable brigand of the flesh than Theseus had been -- yet without that great king’s glory? She recalled that day again -- the heart-stopping terror of it, yes, but also the surge of exhilaration with which she had imagined herself carried off by a god in the moments before she came to her senses and saw an old man lusting over her.
‘Such beauty must be less a blessing than a curse, ‘Theseus had murmured, and the words had pushed her soul so far into hiding that it remained beyond the reach of even her husband’s considerate hand. Could this man really have fathomed those depths and seen it cowering there? Did he truly know how to call it forth? Why else, despite herself, was she trembling at his words?
And at the touch, tender and undemanding, of his hands at her shoulders?
His face was pressing softly into the hair at the nape of her neck. She could feel the stir of his breath. ‘I know you have not yet had time to learn to love me,’ he was whispering. ‘But you can. You will.’
She pulled away. ‘Hear me,’ she said again, ‘I love my husband. I have a husband who loves me. A husband who loves me dearly.’
He considered for a moment before saying what came into his mind. Then he uttered it quietly.
‘A husband who steals from your chamber to another in the night.’
Her eyes widened, her nostrils flared.
‘How can you know that?’
‘Because I saw it with my own eyes. I came down on that first night to where we had dined together. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you. I saw him then.’
Drawing in her breath, she lifted her chin. ‘Menelaus is king here. He has a king’s rights.’
‘What rights could possibly take him from your bed?’
‘His right to a son,’ Helen said, ‘which is a thing I cannot give him.’
Paris stood winded by her answer.
With a kind of defiance the words burst from her. ‘So yours is a barren dream, you see. A barren dream of a barren woman.’ But before she looked away he saw the anguish in her face, and his heart went out to her. For a time their two vulnerable lives confronted one another across the still glade.
‘I am so sorry,’ he whispered.
And she looked up into a face so softened by compassion that she might have wept.
Who was this man? He had the appearance of a prince but there was such clear, uncourtly candour in his gaze that he might have been a country swain. So perhaps he was, simply, what he so passionately claimed to be -- a man so far in love with her that he understood nothing else.
Unable to speak, to move, she was thinking, ‘If my death is here then the goddess has sent it.’
But it was of life he was speaking -- a life in which they might come to share the passion of the gods. A life such as only those elected into love could know, and of them only those who were prepared to offer everything.
He had reached out, tenderly, to touch her again. Immediately she pulled away as if she had opened her eyes to find herself on a chasm’s edge and was reaching back for the safety of everything she knew. Though he had come no closer, she stretched out a hand in refusal, keeping him at a distance, repeating the word ‘No’ four or five times like a protective charm.
Gently, he shook his head. ‘I think we are in the hands of the goddess now.’ He reached out to pluck a damask rose from the bush. ‘She means well by us.’ He pricked the pad of one of his fingers on a thorn, and then pressed it softly to her lips till they too were smudged with blood.
Helen took another step away, open-mouthed. ‘Do you blame the goddess for all the havoc that you wreak?’
Paris smiled down at her with the serene calm of a true believer. ‘No.’ Gravely he shook his head. ‘I praise her.’
Moving closer again, he threaded the green stem through the tied-back tresses of her hair. ‘I shall wait for you tonight,’ he whispered. ‘If you can deny what I have said, then
leave me to pine alone and condemn us both to wither unrequited. Otherwise come to me.’ Then he brushed past her shoulder and walked from the myrtle grove without a backward glance.
The Flight from Sparta
Aeneas’s ship, the Gorgona, was the first to make landfall in Troy. The voyage home had proved less placid than the voyage out as a stiff gale blew up, forcing the ship to make way through rain against a heavy swell. Nor was the mood of Aeneas less turbulent than that of the sea he crossed. Already furious with Paris, he was convinced that his love-crazed friend had deliberately altered course in the dark of the storm to shake him off. So for days the Gorgona had battled the dirty weather alone, charting a course through the Cyclades, expecting at any moment to see an Argive warship overhauling them out of the dark horizon.
The odds were all against it, of course, for the Trojans would have been well out into the eastern sea before the news reached Menelaus in Crete. Yet the normally equable disposition of the Dardanian prince was so overwrought by His friend’s treacherous behaviour that he lived in daily expectation of divine retribution. His crew, many of whom had grumbled at the hasty departure in foul weather from a port they had come to like, were already murmuring that Hera must have sent this storm against them.
Aeneas was not surprised, therefore, to find no sign of the Aphrodite in the waters of the Hellespont. In fact, as he muttered blackly to his sailing-master, he would have wagered all Dardania against a mouldy fig that if Paris’s vessel was still afloat, it was laid up in some convenient bay while he cooed and dandled with the woman for whom he had put everything at risk.
As soon as he was ashore Aeneas hastened to his father’s palace at the foot of Mount Ida to report on the disastrous outcome of the mission. Anchises listened, impassive as marble, from behind unseeing eyes as his son tried to make sense of Paris’s insane behaviour.
‘I blame myself for not having read the signs earlier. When I had half a chance to think about it afterwards, they seemed obvious enough. His manner at the banquet was so distracted that he came close to giving offence to our hosts.
‘And I’ve never known him to be ill before -- not even when he was drinking far into the night and tupping the palace-women like a randy ass. Yet two days after we arrived, there he was, complaining of sickness and headaches, and lying in bed when there was good hunting to be done. I put it down to the rigours of the cleansing ordeal at the time, but he’s seen more than enough blood not to quail at the smell of it. He should have felt freed by the purgation, uplifted by it even. If I hadn’t been so eager for the hunt myself, I might have suspected something dubious was happening when he hurried me off to the mountains as soon as the king’s back was turned. I should have seen that . . .’ Aeneas halted the rush of self-recriminatory thought. ‘But he must have been so far out of his senses by then that I doubt I could have stopped him.’
‘Not out of his senses,’ Anchises said. ‘Intoxicated by them. I recognized it in that youth a long time ago. His adoration of Aphrodite was always excessive. I tried to counsel him once in the wisdom of Apollo. But who was I to berate him for his love of the Golden One, when I have blighted my own life in her service?’ Sighing, the old king pulled his cloak closer about his shoulders. ‘Do not rebuke yourself. Aphrodite was always single-minded in her obsessions. If she has chosen Paris for the instrument of her passion, then nothing you or I or anyone could do would keep him from his fate.’
‘But Menelaus was his friend,’ Aeneas protested. ‘The man even saved my life! And now I’m left torn between them. Zeus knows, I’ve always loved Paris -- ever since that first day when I watched him bloody Deiphobus’s nose. But I feel his treachery could scarcely be greater if it was my wife he had stolen.’
‘Be thankful, therefore, that Helen was not your wife, for Aphrodite would not have spared you that betrayal.’ Anchises’s sigh was heavy with resignation. ‘In any case, Paris has betrayed us all. You and he went to Sparta in search of peace. What he has done provides the Argives with a perfect case for war.’
‘Unless someone more powerful than me can persuade him to give her up.’
‘Do you think he will ever do that?’
Aeneas thought for only a moment before shaking his head again. ‘No. He is gone beyond all reason. I don’t believe he will.’
‘But what of Helen?’ Anchises said. ‘Might she be persuaded to return?’
‘Who can say what a woman might do in her circumstances? I tried to speak to her, I warned her of the consequences of her actions, but she was like a woman in a dream . . . except that there was a gleam in her eye such as I have seen only in the green stare of a wolf that knows it may die but will go down to the end enduring all.’ Aeneas drew in his breath deeply. ‘I think that Helen too must be possessed by a god. How else could she have let herself abandon her child?’
‘She left her children in Sparta?’
‘She has only one. A daughter, Hermione, a child almost as beautiful as Helen herself. For some reason -- a prophetic instinct perhaps -- the child had taken against Paris. And in the end Helen saw she must choose between Paris and her daughter. Had they tried to take Hermione with them, the child would have made the night loud with her screams. They could never have left the palace unseen.’
‘Did you not challenge Helen on this score?’
‘Of course I did! She answered that Hermione had always been her father’s child, and that it would be more cruel to take her than to leave her behind. Whether she believed this or not, I cannot say. Certainly she is already suffering for the choice she made.’
‘Passion always exacts a price. Paris will come to pay it in his time. But we must do what we can to make sure that all Troy is not made to answer for his crime.’ Aeneas turned his blind gaze on his son and reached out a hand to draw him closer. ‘We will speak with Antenor first -- he has Priam’s ear and is no friend to Paris. Then the three of us together will confront the High King with this news. It cannot be long before the sons of Atreus are hammering at his door.’
‘And all Argos has sworn to defend Menelaus’s right to Helen.’
‘Yes,’ Anchises sighed. ‘I begin to fear that a still greater power than Aphrodite lies behind these events. If Sky-Father Zeus has decided that the time has come to cut a swathe through mortal men, then war might prove terrible indeed. We Dardanians must consider carefully how much we are prepared to risk for Troy.’
And what of the lovers meanwhile? Once they had found their way into each other’s arms, they would have sequestered themselves away for many days in an uninterrupted dream of love if they had been left free to choose; for in the few hours they were able to spend together that first night they were like astonished travellers entering a realm of the senses such as neither had known before. All trace of hostility between them had instantly dissolved, transformed by some subtle alchemy of love into a tender ferocity of desire to know the other more deeply in every crevice of their being, every gesture of feeling and of thought. And when the love-making was done, they lay side by side, talking and talking about their lives, as though their souls had always been intimate, though separated by the world for many years.
Gazing into Helen’s eyes, Paris recalled how an ascetic priest visiting Troy out of India had once tried to persuade him that the human soul journeys through many lifetimes in search of peace. Though he had laughed off this philosophy as extravagant at the time, it now seemed easy to believe that he and Helen had known each other long before they met, in some other time, some other world. He whispered this into her ear as he lay beside her, and she smiled at him, saying, ‘Perhaps it was in another life that I gave you that mark about your neck -- unless some other woman has already set her teeth in you!’
‘I remember nothing of any other woman,’ he whispered. ‘If there were any, they were only the vaguest dreams of you. But that mark has been with me from birth. My mother said it was as though I had been bitten by passion, and I swear I have never known true passion before. Perhaps you
are right and Aphrodite left that sign for you to know me by. Come, let me lift your hair and brand you with the same mark, so we will know each other again in all the lives to come.’
‘I believe I would know you,’ she said as he raised his mouth from her, ‘if I were deaf and blind, and an age of men had passed between this life and the next.’
‘And I you,’ he replied, ‘if the sun were to die and there was only endless night.’
Yet at other moments, as they gazed into the unfathomable wonder of each other’s eyes, the sense of accomplished union was so complete that there was no need for speculation - or of any words at all -- to comprehend what was happening between them: the whole universe was simply and entirely love.
Yet if there were times when their hearts stood still that night, time itself would have no stop, and long before the first cock crowed, alarm was gathering in Helen’s heart. Despite her lover’s pleas and protests, she dragged herself from the bed just before dawn and hurried back to the royal apartment, fearful at every turn that she might be seen. Alone in her marriage bed, she shook at the knowledge of what had been done and what was now asked of her. Her mind refused all thought. She stared into the gathering light, knowing that any return to her former life was now impossible, and unable to see a way to any other.
When her child Hermione came running into the chamber to tell her of the bad dreams that had troubled her sleep, Helen could scarcely bring herself to speak. Filled with self-loathing, she longed for nothing more than to be free of the child for a few hours more and be clasped back in her lover’s arms again. But she cast about for words of comfort and promised Hermione that her father would indeed be back in Sparta soon and would keep her safe from all her fears.
Of all the people around her, only one observed the change in Helen that day. Aethra, the former Queen of Troizen who had been her bond-servant and companion for many years, divined at once the agitation of her heart. It was her keen eye that observed the swift change in the colour of her face when Paris appeared in the reception chamber later that morning. And after Helen had vanished for hours that afternoon only to return flustered and distraught, her hair fallen and tangled like a storm-blown vine, it was Aethra, patiently waiting for her in the royal apartment, who looked up from her stitch-work and asked. ‘So has the Trojan been thunderstruck by your beauty as my son once was?’
The War At Troy Page 18
