The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  Menelaus did raise his sword, but then he hesitated, gazing upon the perfection of my bosom.

  “There is no impediment to your blade. Why do you wait and waste your brother’s precious time? Surely he would love to see the harlot of Sparta, whore of Troy, dispatched with alacrity so he can get about the business of sacking Ilios and taking his pick of the choicest females to warm the bed he rightfully shares with my sister back in Mycenae.”

  Menelaus’s eyes met mine, if only for a moment. Then he returned his gaze, as if bewitched or hypnotized, to my half-nude body. He sheathed his sword. “I cannot kill you,” he said in a choked whisper. His eyes were dimmed with tears. He prodded the leering Agamemnon out of my chamber. “Now dress yourself and come with me,” he commanded.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Outside, the Achaeans were everywhere, swarming like ants. The air was thick with smoke. No building had remained unscarred from their torches. Cries of Troyan souls expelling their final, defiant breaths filled the night. The Greeks had climbed the walls and had set fire to the twin towers, while below, the city burned like a giant bonfire, sending huge, choking billows of black smoke skyward. Citizens who had climbed the battlements, mistakenly believing they would find shelter there, threw themselves into the flames and roiling smoke when they saw their cause was lost. Better to choose to die than perish by the enemy’s sword.

  I looked up and saw Andromache, clutching the baby Astyanax. Beside her stood Odysseus and two Achaean soldiers who tried to wrest the infant from her grasp. She fought like a demon but was no match for the warriors’ strength. Odysseus did nothing to help her. Andromache lost the tug-of-war, and under the crafty Ithacan’s stern gaze, the soldiers threw Hector’s tiny son over the wall, dashing his body on the stones below.

  “Monster!” I shrieked at Odysseus, and then I saw Polyxena being dragged from the palace, no doubt being taken to Achilles’s funeral pyre after all. Odysseus had played Hecuba false as well, breaking his pledge to see that the girl remained unharmed. Just as the long war had begun with the sacrifice of a young girl, so it would end.

  Around me, all was chaos. When we’d left my house, Menelaus had grasped me by the wrist and refused to release his grip, but somehow in the confusion we had become separated. Buildings were collapsing all around me. The noise of human cries, tumbling masonry, bronze against bronze was deafening and terrifying. I sidestepped mangled bodies—among them, children with their unseeing eyes wide open as though death had taken them by surprise—and climbed over smoldering rubble, seeking shelter. I saw a girl no older than my little Helen, who ran out of her house to chase her fleeing pet, a frightened housecat, and was cut down with an Achaean spear that drove straight through her fragile body into that of her panicked mother.

  I raced up the steps of the Temple of Apollo hoping to find sanctuary, but learned that nothing had remained sacred to the enemy. A woman’s anguished screams echoed off the walls; following her cries, I found Cassandra, virgin priestess, legs splayed, suffering a brutal rape upon the altar. Her attacker, Ajax the Lesser, had been one of my suitors. I hoped my own scream would distract him, but I could not be heard above the clamor. An Achaean warrior then blocked my path, and I ducked under his arm, narrowly avoiding Agamemnon, who was entering the temple. As I hid in a darkened niche, I watched the High King haul the vicious Ajax from his victim’s half-naked body, then drag Cassandra from the shrine himself.

  An ear-shattering sound split the night, and I looked up to see one of the turrets atop Priam’s palace being shaken from its foundation by dozens of men, Troyans, who, in a misguided effort to demolish the invaders, hurled painted tiles and gilded roof timbers at their enemy. In a final desperate effort to save themselves, they pushed what remained of the turret over the rooftop, crushing scores of people below. Soldier and civilian were leveled in the rubble.

  The Achaeans weakened the doors of Priam’s palace by hacking at them with their axes. Then a group of warriors took up one of the fallen beams and with it rammed the doors until they broke apart, bursting the great bronze hinge plates from their sockets. Charging over the debris, the Greeks entered the building before the Troyans could climb down from the roof.

  Priam and Hecuba and the surviving members of the royal family had sought sanctuary by the altar of Zeus in the inner courtyard of the palace. They clung to one another, pouring panicked libations and offering their frightened prayers. Priam was girded in his outmoded corselet, his sword, the blade dulled with age and lack of use, hanging ineffectually from his side. For the first time since I had come to Ilios, Queen Hecuba embraced me.

  “It’s over,” she murmured.

  I took her tearstained face between my hands. She looked relieved, then reached again for Priam.

  Suddenly, a group of Achaeans burst into the temple. I heard someone shout “Neoptolemus!” The unhelmed person they referred to was not much older than a boy, a mere stripling, but he had his father’s swagger and was in feature the very likeness of Achilles.

  The warriors charged in, heedless of the sanctity of the shrine, killing Polites, one of Priam’s youngest sons, before the boy could unsheathe his sword.

  Extricating himself from his wife’s tearful embrace, Priam rose and took a step or two toward Neoptolemus. “Have mercy for the king of Wilusa,” he said gently, entreating the son of Achilles with open arms. “Do not defile the temple and profane the name of Zeus by committing murder in a sacred shrine. Your father and I earned each other’s respect. I offer you equal esteem and ask only the same from you.”

  “I am not my father,” sneered the youth, his voice pitched in the crackly chasm twixt boy and man. “He who spares his enemies does not win the war.”

  And before Priam could say another word, Neoptolemus released his spear. The long shaft split the air with a whish, striking the old king in the chest, impaling him all the way through his spine. The stunned Priam tried to speak, but the only thing to issue from his parched lips was a gurgling stream of blood. An ugly stain of lurid purple spread across his chest. The king crumpled to his knees as his beloved wife ran to his side, and cradling his head against her bosom, held him until he breathed his last.

  Not content to merely claim his victory, Achilles’s son committed the ultimate disgrace to Priam’s corpse. Shoving the weeping Hecuba away from her husband’s body, Neoptolemus twined his fingers around the king’s white locks and with one swift stroke of his sword, beheaded him. Priam’s headless body was then flung out of doors, a corpse with no name, the final ignominy.

  Neoptolemus ordered his warriors to remove the Troyan women from the temple. The men were butchered mercilessly. A soldier stopped me as I tried to flee. “Don’t touch her,” commanded Achilles’s son, realizing who I was. “Menelaus will deal with the whore who married him.”

  “You disgusting and unnatural child,” I spat. “I pray to Zeus that someday your sneer will be wiped from your pimpled face and you will drown in your own arrogance.”

  I stepped outside what was left of the palace into the center of a most puzzling melee. The Achaeans seemed to be fighting one another. I realized then that the brave Troyans who had managed to kill one of their enemy had donned their rival’s armor, the better to blend in among the ravaging Greeks. The citizens were not going quietly into the bloody night: They had climbed up on their roofs and were tearing them apart with axes, hurling the beams on the Achaeans. Arrows rained down on the enemy from the rooftops of the lower city. The night air stank of death and the reeking metallic odor of fresh blood. It flowed like wine along the gutters of the streets and down toward the sea.

  And then I heard a terrible groaning, as though the very stones of Ilios were weeping. With a deafening rumble, the blazing south tower of the ramparts toppled to the ground, its weight collapsing the stretch of wall beneath it. Human bodies, engulfed in flames, fell from its observation platform like Icarus tumbling from the sky. Below the crumbling wall, people fled the tidal wave of billowing smoke that pursu
ed them like the Furies, nearly blinded by it. Many of the survivors stumbled on debris or over each other and fell to the ground, only to be trampled by the stampeding hordes seeking safety from the roiling cloud of smoke and ash. The terror that there might be no tomorrow—or perhaps more frightening, that if dawn came, Eos would bring them a worse fate—was evident in the Troyans’ frightened faces.

  Minutes later, the north tower collapsed, sending a second thunderous wave of devastation rolling through the burning city. The screams of the dying echoed through the night, reverberating off the remaining walls.

  Horses, terrified and confused, charged through the streets, their frightened whinnies piercing the night; some people, who had considered themselves fortunate to have escaped the toppling of the towers, were crushed beneath the rampaging hooves.

  Dazed survivors injured by falling debris wandered mutely through the city. Coated with ash, they resembled walking statues.

  The wells had been drained dry, and no more water was available to douse the burning buildings. Blazing roofs caved in, sending shrieking people running into the streets, their clothes afire, trying to smite the licking tongues of flame that hungrily devoured their garments. Some flung themselves onto the ground, rolling like a cart wheel in a desperate effort to extinguish the flames. The lucky ones rushed out of doors unharmed, only to be run through by an Achaean’s blade.

  Through the acrid gloom I somehow made my way back to what remained of the home that Paris Alexandros had so lovingly built for us. The courtyard was filled with rubble; my birdbath, fountain, and beautiful statues had all been utterly demolished. My door, carved from a stately rowan tree, had been beaten down and trampled upon, reduced to planks and splinters. The frescoed walls were crumbling. Inside, the furniture had been upended and smashed to bits. I noticed that some of the smaller items, like my inlaid stools, had been stolen.

  A foul stench was coming from the second story, and in horror I nearly tripped over the rotting body parts of Deiphobus. His severed head grimaced at me from the floor, the matted black hair caked with dried blood. With one hand pinching my nose and the other covering my mouth, I was not too effective at picking through the wreckage. My dressing table had been overturned; cosmetic pots were everywhere, and perfume alabastrons had shattered, spilling their contents onto the woven rugs. My most beautiful robes and shawls were gone, along with the exotic hangings and textiles that had graced my chambers. All of my jewelry, too, had been looted. One thing alone had remained pristine; it was something of no value to the Achaeans, but it meant the world to me. Resting between the upturned legs of the dressing table was a perfect white swan’s feather. I plucked it from where it lay and fled.

  Toward first light, the sounds of the dying amid the smoldering ruins of the once-proud and glittering city had diminished from a roar to a whimper. The Achaeans had scarcely left a Troyan male alive. Helenus had survived, as had his kinsman Aeneas, who hobbled toward the beach carrying his invalid father Anchises on his back. Aeneas’s beautiful wife Creusa, the eldest of Priam’s daughters, had begun to follow her husband out of the burning city, only to be separated in the clamor. Her charred body was found by the vanquished Troyan women as they were herded through the lower city toward the beachhead. From there they would be taken as slaves aboard the Achaean ships, never to return to their homeland and forced forevermore to fetch the water, scrub the floors, light the fires—and in some cases, warm the beds—of their new masters, perhaps the very same men whose weapons had killed their sons and husbands.

  A series of beacons had been lit to announce the fall of Troy. The first torch was placed on Mount Ida, the next on the nearby isle of Lemnos, then across the sea to Athos, up precipitous Macistos, from Euripus to Messapion, across Asopus, up Cithaeron, over the marshes of Gorgopis, up Aegiplanctus, and around the gulf to Arachnus, where the flame could be seen from Mycenae and where my sister Clytemnestra would learn that her husband’s homecoming was imminent. I wondered how she—and her lover of many years, Agamemnon’s first cousin Aegisthus—would receive him.

  The gentle beauty of the dawn was made a mockery by the destruction it illuminated with such a rosy glow. In the entire city, only a few buildings had remained completely unharmed. The devastation was even greater in the upper city, where the royal family dwelled, because our riches had been thoroughly plundered. Broken shards of pottery littered the streets. Every item of value had been taken from our homes before they were torched. In the lower city I picked my way over the carcasses of countless horses already attracting clusters of ugly black flies. I gagged from the smell of burnt flesh, textiles, and masonry, and tried not to look at some of the carnage, but there was no avoiding it. Coming across a man whose entrails had been spilled, his eyes gouged out, and his tongue sliced off, I ducked into an alley and vomited. Was that pour soul so tortured in the name of Helen?

  Amid the deserted colonnades of Aeneas’s abandoned house, the Achaeans counted out their treasure. All the loot from the palace, from the gutted temples and razed homes of the pillaged city—such as robes, jewels, wine bowls of solid gold, artifacts of ivory and amber, and huge feasting tables—had been taken there, with the cunning Odysseus standing guard against dishonesty and theft. I wished that with every stolen Troyan cup that touched their lips, the liquid, no matter how originally sweet, would turn bitter on their lips.

  Where had Agamemnon’s hubris gotten any of them? The Achaeans had razed Ilios to the ground and were returning home with a few pretty trinkets and a number of demoralized and angry slave women. What of his grand plans to control the trade routes through the tricky waters of the Hellespont? It would take years to rebuild what his men had destroyed in a single night of violence and bloodlust. What a bitter irony that the most valuable prize the Greeks would come away with after a decade of war was the thing they claimed to fight for in the first place: Helen.

  The distribution of the slaves was sickening. And the women of Priam’s royal family were to be separated, divided among the Achaeans’ greatest heroes. Agamemnon seized the beauteous Cassandra; the pimply Neoptolemus claimed Andromache; and to Odysseus’s home in rocky Ithaca would go poor weeping Hecuba, snarling invectives at her new master and tearing at her long white hair.

  Menelaus took no slaves from among the Troyan women, and he was eager to get under sail. It had taken several hours for the chieftains to agree on the distribution of slaves and to load the ships. Many of the men were completely in their cups, having spent the day celebrating their triumphant defeat of the Trojans. Thus possessed by the spirit of Dionysus the wine god, they were in no condition to reason clearly; nonetheless, at dusk the High King gathered them together in order to sacrifice a hecatomb to Athena. Acknowledging the atrocities his men had committed the night before—against the holy temples and the priestesses, as well as the rampant savagery against the lay population of Ilios—Agamemnon realized it was doubtful that the gods would grant them favorable winds. He believed the hecatomb would suffice to cleanse their hands of butchery.

  Menelaus quarreled with his brother; he wished to leave immediately, thinking Agamemnon’s sacrifice—so little, so late—would only be scoffed at by the Olympians. The following dawn, Menelaus and the chieftains who had sided with him against Agamemnon pushed their ships off the sand, raised their sails, and dipped their oars in the white-crested waves. We were bound for home. The other chieftains remained onshore with Agamemnon to make their sacrifices.

  How strange it felt to be returning to Achaea after so many years! I had not even been on my beloved sea in all that time and found the rise and fall of the hull the only comfort amid my myriad fears. I tried not to show Menelaus how terrified I was. He had scarcely spoken to me, except to tell me to board the ship and where to sit. I had no idea what he was thinking or what he planned to do with me. The only vestige of kindness came when he soundly rebuked his oarsmen for their impertinent snickering. “This lady is your captain’s wife—and your queen,” he reminded them. “An
d as such, you will honor her. The first man to disparage Helen again will be whipped.” But to treat me rudely was an equal dishonor to Menelaus, and regardless of how he felt about me, he needed to maintain his crew’s respect.

  As we neared Tenedos, the seas churned up. It was late summer, the setting of the Pleiades, the time of year when the winds began to blow, so the angry waters should have been no surprise to the sailors. Odysseus’s ships and those that followed him decided to return to Ilios, fearing that the rough seas were a sign that Agamemnon had been in the right to insist on offering proper sacrifices. We continued our course for Sparta alongside the flotilla of old Nestor of Pylos. And still, Menelaus all but ignored me. Did that bode well or ill? Because he was so enigmatic, I could not tell.

  The nearer we got to Sparta, the more anxious I became. How would my subjects treat their errant queen? And my children? Where were they? Were they well? How would they greet me? By now, Nico, the baby I had left behind, was about the same age I had been when I wed his father. I had to ask Menelaus about them. Both of us had been avoiding the subject. Hermione, he told me, still dwelt in the palace in Sparta. She could not wed without a proper kyrios to represent her.

  “And our sons?” I asked fearfully.

  For a few moments, the only sound I heard was the slapping of the waves against the ship’s black hull.

  Menelaus swallowed hard. Finally, he said, “They died like men.”

  “In Ilios?”

  He nodded, his face a mask of pain and sorrow.

  “All of them?”

  Menelaus looked at me.

  “Even little Nico?”

  Silence.

  “He was barely more than a boy!” I grimly realized that he was probably the same age as Neoptolemus. Menelaus tentatively placed his hand on my shoulder. I flinched and he removed it. “Leave me be,” I said. “I wish to grieve in peace.”