The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  ‘Why think about ransom when you’ll be able to take all his family’s treasure soon enough?’ he growled. ‘Be done with him.’

  Menelaus pushed Adrestos away. He was still staring down into his terrified eyes when Agamemnon lifted his spear and thrust it deep into the young Trojan’s side. Gasping out a cry, Adrestos fell backwards on the ground. Agamemnon put a foot on his stomach, pulled the ash-spear out, and turned to shout his men on.

  Towards the end of the day, when both sides were exhausted by their efforts, there came a lull in the fighting. Seeing that his fellow Trojans needed fresh heart, Hector stepped out between the lines, shouting out a challenge of single combat, but so fearsome was his reputation as a warrior that none of the Argive champions immediately rose to meet him. Menelaus would have done so, but he was restrained by his brother, so Nestor got to his feet berating this younger generation of warriors for its lack of spirit. Stung by the old man’s reproaches, nine of them leapt up, including Diomedes, whose shoulder was stiffening from the wound he had taken earlier in the day. Lots were drawn for the honour of fighting Hector, and the lot fell on Telamon’s son, Ajax, the Prince of Salamis.

  So the day came to an end, as it had begun, with two heroes facing one another between the lines. But right from the first the fight seemed more evenly matched this time. Though both men took wounds, neither would concede victory to the other, so they fought on, grunting and panting in their armour, stumbling as their blades swung and fell, until the plain began to darken round them. Eventually, by mutual agreement, the two heralds -- Talthybius of the Argives and Idaeus of the Trojans -- intervened with their staves to push the exhausted men apart.

  ‘Clearly, you are both beloved of Cloud-gathering Zeus,’ said Idaeus. ‘But the light has gone. Give up the fight now.’

  ‘Hector issued this challenge,’ Ajax panted. ‘I’ll only lower my sword if he gives the word.’

  Hector thought for only a moment before lifting off his helmet. ‘There’ll be time enough for us to find out which of us is the better man, but what Idaeus says is true. This battle has been long and hard, the light is poor, and we’re both too tired to fight at our best. Let’s agree to call it a day.’ He took in Ajax’s nod, and they were smiling at one another in mutual respect.

  ‘We should exchange gifts in honour of each other’s prowess,’ Hector said, ‘so that our friends can say that both of us fought well and neither returned defeated from the field.’ And when Ajax gladly agreed to this offer, Hector gave him the sword with which, for the past hour, he had been trying to kill him. Ajax studied the fine work on its silver-studded hilt for a moment, and then unslung his own intricately decorated purple baldric and handed it over to the Trojan prince. Then, weary but elated, the two heroes parted friends that night. Yet as they returned to celebrate among their comrades, neither man was aware of the part that those gifts would later come to play in the circumstances of their deaths

  An Offer of Peace

  Hector returned to the city after his duel with Ajax knowing how close he had come to losing that hard fight. His shoulders were bruised, blood was clotting at his knee and he was filled with trepidation that the Trojan host could not withstand many more days such as this. His push to drive the Argives back upon their ships had failed, and they had recoiled with such ferocity that many of the women gathered by the oak-tree at the city gate would not find their husbands, sons and fathers among the warriors returning home. Already the streets were loud with grief, and this was the first day of fighting that Troy had endured in a long time.

  So when he looked back into the dusk where kites and vultures were gathering above the unburied bodies, it seemed to Hector’s weary heart that the weight of favour among the gods had lain with the Argive invaders that day. They had called on Athena for aid and the goddess had answered.

  Something must be done to restore the balance.

  He went first to embrace and reassure his wife Andromache, and to comfort his little son Astyanax who was frightened by the sight of his blood and bruises, and cowered away from his father when Hector, who was still wearing his high-plumed helmet, leaned over to kiss him. Then, when he had bathed his wounds and thoroughly cleansed himself, Hector made his way across the citadel of Ilium to the temple of Athena.

  The priestess at that temple was Theano, the wife of Antenor, a woman who had once been beautiful but whose face had hardened over the years to match the austerity of her soul. She watched as Hector made his offerings and poured the libations. She listened to the fervour of his prayer that Athena lift the force of her wrath from the city, but then she shocked him with her response.

  ‘Divine Athena will not hear you,’ Theano said, ‘no more than she would hear your mother this afternoon. For the time being, the goddess is deaf to our pleas.’

  From where he knelt, Hector looked up into her cold eyes. ‘I could feel her power working against us out there on the plain. It was as though the goddess herself was driving Diomedes’ chariot. What have we done to offend her that she turns against us so?’

  Theano gazed up at the impassive statue of Athena. ‘Why should the goddess listen to us when we give our loyalty to one who has insulted her?’

  ‘You mean my brother Paris?’

  ‘He alone has brought Athena’s rage upon this city.’

  Hector looked into that severe face. Her mouth no more than a peremptory line drawn down towards her chin. He said. ‘I know you have had no love for my brother since the death of your child. How could it be otherwise?’

  ‘There is nothing in my heart for him but hatred.’ Theano’s voice was as calm as it was forthright. ‘I have never denied it, and the hate will never leave me. But this is a matter quite apart from the grave harm he has done to me. This thing lies between Paris and the goddess. In some way I do not understand unless it began with a disparaging of her rites and stature, your brother has earned for himself the unremitting enmity of Athena.’ For a cold moment Hector felt he might have been looking into the face of the goddess herself and he saw no possibility of remission there. ‘He has brought that enmity upon this city,’ Theano said. ‘It falls there, and will continue to fall until reparation is made for the injury he has given her. And it must come from the one with whom the fault lies. It is not enough for you or your mother or King Priam himself to make the offering. Paris is the author of our ills. It is he who has neglected the service of Athena and derided her power. Her quarrel is with him. Let him pay the price of it.’

  Paris had found his way back to the city through a daze of shock and humiliation.

  His vision was blurred and uncertain. He was bleeding where the point of the spear had seared his side. The chinstrap had scorched the skin of his neck, and every bone of his body felt bruised from the battering he had taken. He was drenched and dirty, and shamed by the huge silence across the Trojan lines as they parted to let him through on the road back to the city.

  The same silence waited for him where the women were gathered by the gate. His chariot wheels clattered on the cobbles of the empty street leading up to the citadel. He could hear rainwater gushing along the runnels there. And because of the rain driving into his face and the droplets spilling off his hair, it was impossible to tell that he was weeping, but weeping he was as he entered the silent mansion where he now lived with Helen. He unbuckled his breastplate and greaves, and let them crash to the floor, then threw himself down across the embroidered coverlet of their bed, careless of the mud drying on his arms and legs.

  A slave came in to attend to him and was angrily dismissed.

  Inside the painted room, the silence grew larger round him until he realized that the rain had stopped. Through the casement came a brilliant rinsed light. It fell across the great tapestry where Ares and Aphrodite lay in each other’s arms. In the boughs of the almond tree outside the window a bird began to sing.

  Paris had scrambled away from that defeat with his life intact and little else. His pride was gone. His honour was gon
e. His nerves were shattered -- so much so that he jumped when a great shout went up from the distant battlefield and shuddered on the wind. On any other day he would have climbed up to the roof to see what was happening, but he knew already that, whatever that shout might mean, the continuing endurance of the men struggling across the plain spelled only shame for him. He thought of the panther skin in which he had set out that day. It must be lying somewhere in the mud. It would have been better by far to stay out there and die. So why had he not done so? Why?

  He could still smell Menelaus’ sweat pressing close against him. He could hear the malevolent effort in his grunts. He could see, through the narrow visor of that bronze helmet, his fierce, reviling eyes. And then, as he had been dragged by the throat across the rough ground, choking on the point of suffocation, the world began to shut down round him into a small, airless chamber where for evermore he would see only the menace and loathing in the King of Sparta’s face.

  So when the chinstrap snapped and his head fell suddenly free, his first and only thought had been to get away. And once he had begun to run there was no stopping. He would, he knew, always be running now, for the rest of his days.

  Meanwhile, Helen had been keeping silent company with King Priam in the vast hall of his empty throne room, where he had chosen to sit because he could no more bear to watch the duel than could she. They had sat in perfect silence together, each thinking their own thoughts, and finding no consolation in them, but taking a kind of comfort in the other’s unspeaking presence.

  In the stillness of that marble space all they could hear of the roaring of the hosts watching the two men fight outside was a distant susurration like the murmur of the sea. Then the light from the windows had darkened as the clouds gathered and they heard the rain rattling down onto the tiles. They had glanced at each other in that moment, and though neither spoke, Priam wanted to confess how he had left orders that if his son was killed in the fight, Menelaus must not be allowed to walk in triumph from the field. He wanted to tell the beautiful, silent woman sitting across from him that if both her husbands died, then he himself would care for her till his dying day. Yet he was afraid that she might recoil from the knowledge, so he kept his peace, and waited, as Helen waited, to learn what fate the wisdom of the gods had chosen for them.

  Then Cassandra had come into the hall, white-faced, her hair in disarray, her face and clothing drenched from the rain. She was laughing a little and clutching the damp folds of the gown she wore as though she had been running through the storm. Priam and Helen looked up in alarm as she came in. Of all the people in the city, this half-crazed girl was the one they least wished to hear from in those tense moments.

  ‘Do you smell it yet?’ she said, ‘the smoke that writhes around this house? It will come soon. This place will burn while Helen and I wait to see who comes to claim us. Didn’t I warn you, father? Didn’t I say you should never have taken that she-bear’s foundling back into your house? And see what a wretch he turns out to be, flying from the field without his helmet and shield and panther’s skin. Aphrodite’s spoiled darling, weeping and beaten and looking for succour at the soft breast of his Spartan whore.’

  ‘What of Menelaus?’ her father demanded.

  ‘Struck down by treachery. But living still for all your schemes. The gods will not be cheated, father. This city has burned before and it will burn again. Soon enough the red-haired son of Atreus will stride through this hall to claim his own.’ Cassandra turned the black glamour of her eyes on Helen, whose heart quailed. ‘And will you warm to him once more? I think you will, I think you will. And like a dog at his vomit he will lap you up again.’

  Priam and Helen stared in silence as she walked out of the hall. Then they were left looking at each other like hostile strangers, each seeing the other’s gift for treachery nakedly revealed, and recoiling inwardly from the sight.

  ‘What have you done?’ Helen demanded. ‘Would you have seen them both killed? Is there no honour left in Troy?’

  Priam lifted his hands in a vain gesture which seemed to say that honour was a thing no longer to be found anywhere.

  And Helen had got up, saying, ‘I must go to my husband,’ but even as the word left her mouth she was uncertain of which man she spoke. Her breath shook with the growing understanding that there was now nowhere safe to go.

  When she entered the bed-chamber of the gilded house that Paris had furnished for her with all the spoils of the east, Helen saw him lying in his filth on the bed. Glancing quickly away, she pulled a shawl about her shoulders as though against a draught. Paris opened his mouth to speak but could say nothing.

  She said, ‘Helice tells me that she offered to draw your bath but you refused it. Shall I call her again or do you mean to lie as you are?’

  Still he could not speak.

  ‘I think that your wounds need attention.’

  He said, ‘There is a wound here that only you can heal.’

  ‘There are some wounds that no one can heal.’ Helen turned away from him and walked towards the casement where she stood listening to the din of battle on the wind. At this distance the noise might have been no more than the shouting of a crowd at the games, yet men were fighting and dying out there, and both of them knew that their love -- that sad, abraded, and now almost extinguished love -- was the cause.

  But in that moment, strangely, he was hardly thinking of her. His talk of a wound that only she could heal had brought someone else to his mind. He was thinking of Oenone. He was remembering what the girl had said to him on the day when he first left the mountains to come to Troy. He was remembering how she had warned him that one day he would take a wound that only she would be able to heal. Her words had come back to him and, for a deranging moment, it felt as though he had directed his appeal to the wrong woman.

  And that woman was almost as much a stranger to him now as the rough boy who had once bravely fought off the Argive raiders with his bow. Alexander they had called him, Defender of Men, and who would ever have thought that such a boy would end up lying inside this beaten body on this silken bed in a perfume-scented chamber in the royal precinct of a city that might soon burn because a bear had suckled him once and he had grown up to betray a friend?

  And it was unnerving that he could no longer read the once intimately known thoughts of the woman who stood across from him gazing out towards the plain.

  ‘Why don’t you ask me about it?’ he said to her now.

  She looked at him. ‘Speak about it if you wish.’

  Paris glanced way towards the window. ‘There was such hatred in him. I looked into his eyes and saw myself as he must see me, and it filled me with such a numbing sense of the wrong I had done him that I couldn’t stand against him.’

  Helen studied his anguished frown for a moment before turning away. He could see the nape of her neck beneath the piled hair, and the graceful sweep of her back as she murmured, ‘I think if you had killed him, it would have killed me too.’

  He stared up at her in bewilderment.

  ‘Whatever I have done,’ his voice entreated, ‘I have done it only for you.’

  She turned to look at him again and saw the truth of it. They were alone in all the world, the two of them, exiled for ever in their passionate delinquency. And the only hope for understanding lay in each other’s eyes. She felt a surge of pity rise inside her -- pity for him, pity for Menelaus, pity for herself, pity for all who had ever trusted love to lead them through a loveless world. And perhaps only there, she thought, in the compassion of the injured heart, was there any solace to be found. Certainly, if there were wounds that might never be healed then they were left with no kinder choice than to tend them for each other.

  ‘Come,’ she said, ‘the water has been heated. Let me bathe your wounds.’

  So she led him to the bath and dismissed the slaves who stood ready to serve him, for neither of them could endure the company of others. He lay with his eyes closed in the tepid water as she washed the
blood and filth from his limbs. Then they returned to their chamber and lay down together, and when he became aware that she was weeping silently, he too began to weep.

  Reaching out a hand to stroke the dark fall of her hair, he said, ‘Do you remember our small kingdom of Kranae - where there were only the two of us?’

  She nodded, lifting her cheek to the soft brush of his fingertips.

  ‘It was a place of the heart,’ he whispered. ‘We don’t belong in Sparta or in Troy. We belong to Kranae and we are traitors only when we betray that place, for there were no armies there, and no quarrels, and all this din and clash of weaponry is not of our choice, not of our making.’

  He closed his arms about her. She lowered her head against his chest, and though both of them knew that every word he uttered was falsified by a world that was locked in mortal conflict round them, they gave themselves once more to Aphrodite, and returned for the last time to their island kingdom of the heart.

  It was Hector who woke them. The slaves had told him they were in their chamber so he hammered at the door until Paris came to open it. A robe was draped loosely round his shoulders and the smell of sleep and sex hung about him still. Hector studied his dishevelled brother with incredulous contempt.

  ‘Is it not enough for one day,’ he said, ‘that you should set an example in cowardice before all the host, but that you must now lie pleasuring yourself in bed while men fight and die out there in your name, for your cause?’