by C. S. Lewis
But they had to get out first. The signal from outside ought to have come hours ago. Perhaps all the others, all round him in the dark, were quite certain that something had gone wrong, and each was waiting for someone else to say it. There was no difficulty in thinking of things that might have gone wrong. He saw now that the whole plan had been crazy from the beginning. What was there to prevent their all being roasted alive where they sat? Why should their own friends from outside ever find them? Or find them alone and unguarded? How if no signal ever came and they never got out at all? They were in a death-trap.
He dug his nails into his palms and shut off these thoughts by mere force. For everyone knew, and everyone had said before they got in, that these were the very thoughts that would come during the long wait, and that at all costs you must not think them; whatever else you pleased, but not those.
He started thinking about the Woman again. He let pictures rise in the dark, all kinds; clothed, naked, asleep, awake, drinking, dancing, nursing the child, laughing. A little spark of desire began to glow; the old, ever-renewed astonishment. He blew on it most deliberately. Nothing like lust for keeping fear at a distance and making time pass.
But nothing would make the time pass.
Hours later cramp woke him with a scream on his mouth. Instantly a hand was thrust beneath his chin, forcing his teeth shut. ‘Quiet. Listen,’ said several voices. For now at last there was a noise from outside; a tapping from beneath the floor. Oh Zeus, Zeus, make it to be real; don’t let it be a dream. There it came again, five taps and then five and then two, just as they had arranged. The darkness around him was full of elbows and knuckles. Everyone seemed to be moving. ‘Get back there,’ said someone. ‘Give us room.’ With a great wrenching sound the trapdoor came up. A square of lesser darkness—almost, by comparison, of light—appeared at Yellowhead’s feet. The joy of mere seeing, of seeing anything at all, and the deep draughts he took of the clean, cold air, put everything else out of his mind for the moment. Someone beside him was paying a rope out through the opening.
‘Get on then,’ said a voice in his ear.
He tried to, then gave it up. ‘I must unstiffen first,’ he said.
‘Then out of my way,’ said the voice. A burly figure thrust itself forward and went hand over hand down the rope and out of sight. Another and another followed. Yellowhead was almost the last.
And so, breathing deep and stretching their limbs, they all stood by the feet of the great wooden horse with the stars above them, and shivered a little in the cold night wind that blew up the narrow streets of Troy.
II
‘Steady, men,’ said Yellowhead Menelaus. ‘Don’t go inside yet. Get your breath.’ Then in a lower voice, ‘Get in the doorway, Eteoneus, and don’t let them in. We don’t want them to start looting yet.’
It was less than two hours since they had left the horse, and all had gone extremely well. They had had no difficulty in finding the Scaean gate. Once you are inside a city’s wall every unarmed enemy is either a guide or a dead man, and most choose to be the first. There was a guard at the gate, of course, but they had disposed of it quickly and, what was best of all, with very little noise. In twenty minutes they had got the gate open and the main army was pouring in. There had been no serious fighting till they reached the citadel. It had been lively enough there for a bit, but Yellowhead and his Spartans had suffered little, because Agamemnon had insisted on leading the van. Yellowhead had thought, all things considered, that this place should have been his own, for the whole war was in a sense his war, even if Agamemnon were the King of Kings and his elder brother. Once they were inside the outer circling wall of the citadel, the main body had set about the inner gate which was very strong, while Yellowhead and his party had been sent round to find a back way in. They had overpowered what defence they found there and now they stopped to pant and mop their faces and clean their swords and spear-blades.
This little porch opened on a stone platform circled by a wall that was only breast-high. Yellowhead leaned his elbow on it and looked down. He could not see the stars now. Troy was burning. The glorious fires, the loud manes and beards of flame and the billows of smoke, blotted out the sky. Beyond the city the whole countryside was lit up with the glare; you could see even the familiar and hated beach itself and the endless line of ships. Thank the gods, they would soon bid good-bye to that!
While they had been fighting he had never given Helen a thought and had been happy; he had felt himself once more a king and a soldier, and every decision he made had proved right. As the sweat dried, though he was thirsty as an oven and had a smarting little gash above his knee, some of the sweetness of victory began to come into his mind. Agamemnon no doubt would be called the City-Sacker. But Yellowhead had a notion that when the story reached the minstrels he himself would be the centre of it. The pith of the song would be how Menelaus, King of Sparta, had won back from the barbarians the most beautiful woman in the world. He did not yet know whether he would take her back to his bed or not, but he would certainly not kill her. Destroy a trophy like that?
A shiver reminded him that the men would be getting cold and that some might be losing their nerve. He thrust through the mass and went up the shallow steps to where Eteoneus was standing. ‘I’ll come here,’ he said. ‘You bring up the rear and chivvy them on.’ Then he raised his voice. ‘Now, friends,’ he said, ‘we’re going in. Keep together and keep your eyes open. There may be mopping up to do. And they’re probably holding some passage further in.’
He led them for a few paces under darkness past fat pillars and then out into a small court open to the sky; brilliantly lit at one moment as the flames shot up from some house collapsing in the outer city and then again almost totally dark. It was clearly slaves’ quarters. A chained dog, standing on its hind legs, barked at them with passionate hatred from one corner and there were piles of garbage. And then—‘Ah! Would you?’ he cried. Armed men were pouring out of a doorway straight ahead. They were princes of the blood by the look of their armour, one of them little more than a child, and they had the look—Yellowhead had seen it before in conquered towns—of men who are fighting to die rather than to kill. They are the most dangerous sort while they last. He lost three men there, but they got all the Trojans. Yellowhead bent down and finished off the boy who was still writhing like a damaged insect. Agamemnon had often told him that this was a waste of time, but he hated to see them wriggle.
The next court was different. There seemed to be much carved work on the walls, the pavement was of blue and white flagstones, and there was a pool in the middle. Female shapes, hard to see accurately in the dancing firelight, scattered away from them to left and right into the shadows, like rats when you come suddenly into a cellar. The old ones wailed in high, senseless voices as they hobbled. The girls screamed. His men were after them; as if terriers had been sent in among the rats. Here and there a scream ended in a titter.
‘None of that,’ shouted Yellowhead. ‘You can have all the women you want tomorrow. Not now.’
A man close beside him had actually dropped his spear to have both hands free for the exploration of a little, dark sixteen-year-old who looked like an Egyptian. His fat lips were feeding on her face. Yellowhead fetched him one across the buttocks with the flat of his sword.
‘Let her go, with a curse on you,’ he said, ‘or I’ll cut your throat.’
‘Get on. Get on,’ shouted Eteoneus from behind. ‘Follow the King.’
Through an archway a new and steadier light appeared; lamplight. They came into a roofed place. It was extraordinarily still and they themselves became still as they entered it. The noise of the assault and the battering-ram at the main gate on the other side of the castle seemed to be coming from a great distance. The lamp flames were unshaken. The room was full of a sweet smell, you could smell the costliness of it. The floor was covered with soft stuff, dyed in crimson. There were cushions of silk piled upon couches of ivory; panels of ivory also on the
walls and squares of jade brought from the end of the world. The room was of cedar and gilded beams. They were humiliated by the richness. There was nothing like this at Mycenae, let alone at Sparta; hardly perhaps at Cnossus. And each man thought, ‘And thus the barbarians have lived these ten years while we sweated and shivered in huts on the beach.’
‘It was time it ended,’ said Yellowhead to himself. He saw a great vase so perfect in shape that you would think it had grown like a flower, made of some translucent stuff he had never seen before. It stupefied him for a second. Then, in retaliation, he drove at it as hard as he could with the butt-end of his spear and shattered it into a hundred tinkling and shining fragments. His men laughed. They began following his example—breaking, tearing. But it disgusted him when they did it.
‘Try what’s behind the doors,’ he said. There were many doors. From behind some of them they dragged or led the women out; not slaves but kings’ wives or daughters. The men attempted no foolery; they knew well enough these were reserved for their betters. And their faces showed ghastly. There was a curtained doorway ahead. He swept the heavy, intricately embroidered, stuff aside and went in. Here was an inner, smaller, more exquisite room.
It was many-sided. Four very slender pillars held up the painted roof and between them hung a lamp that was a marvel of goldsmith’s work. Beneath it, seated with her back against one of the pillars, a woman, no longer young, sat with her distaff, spinning; as a great lady might sit in her own house a thousand miles away from the war.
Yellowhead had been in ambushes. He knew what it costs even a trained man to be still on the brink of deadly danger. He thought, ‘That woman must have the blood of gods in her.’ He resolved he would ask her where Helen was to be found. He would ask her courteously.
She looked up and stopped her spinning, but still she did not move.
‘The child,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Is she still alive? Is she well?’ Then, helped by the voice, he recognised her. And with the first second of his recognition all that had made the very shape of his mind for eleven years came tumbling down in irretrievable ruin. Neither that jealousy nor that lust, that rage nor that tenderness, could ever be revived. There was nothing inside him appropriate to what he saw. For a moment there was nothing inside him at all.
For he had never dreamed she would be like this; never dreamed that the flesh would have gathered under her chin, that the face could be so plump and yet so drawn, that there would be grey hair at her temples and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Even her height was less than he remembered. The smooth glory of her skin which once made her seem to cast a light from her arms and shoulders was all gone. An ageing woman; a sad, patient, composed woman, asking for her daughter; for their daughter.
The astonishment of it jerked a reply out of him before he well knew what he was doing. ‘I’ve not seen Hermione for ten years,’ he said. Then he checked himself. How had she the effrontery to ask like that, just as an honest wife might? It would be monstrous for them to fall into an ordinary husbandly and wifely conversation as if nothing had come between. And yet what had come between was less disabling than what he now encountered.
About that he suffered a deadlock of conflicting emotions. It served her right. Where was her vaunted beauty now? Vengeance? Her mirror punished her worse than he could every day. But there was pity too. The story that she was the daughter of Zeus, the fame that had made her a legend on both sides of the Aegean, all dwindled to this, all destroyed like the vase he had shivered five minutes ago. But there was shame too. He had dreamed of living in stories as the man who won back the most beautiful woman in the world, had he? And what he had won back was this. For this Patroclus and Achilles had died. If he appeared before the army leading this as his prize, as their prize, what could follow but universal curses or universal laughter? Inextinguishable laughter to the world’s end. Then it darted into his mind that the Trojans must have known it for years. They too must have roared with laughter every time a Greek fell. Not only the Trojans, the gods too. They had known all along. It had diverted them through him to stir up Agamemnon and through Agamemnon to stir up all Greece, and set two nations by the ears for ten winters, all for a woman whom no one would buy in any market except as a housekeeper or a nurse. The bitter wind of divine derision blew in his face. All for nothing, all a folly and himself the prime fool.
He could hear his own men clattering into the room behind him. Something would have to be decided. Helen did and said nothing. If she had fallen at his feet and begged for forgiveness; if she had risen up and cursed him; if she had stabbed herself. . . . But she only waited with her hands (they were knuckley hands now) on her lap. The room was filling with men. It would be terrible if they recognised Helen; perhaps worse if he had to tell them. The oldest of the soldiers was staring at her very hard and looking from her to Yellowhead.
‘So!’ said the man at last, almost with a chuckle. ‘Well, by all the—’
Eteoneus nudged him into silence. ‘What do you wish us to do, Menelaus?’ he asked, looking at the floor.
‘With the prisoners—the other prisoners?’ said Yellow-head. ‘You must detail a guard and get them all down to camp. The rest at Nestor’s place, for the distribution. The Queen—this one—to our own tents.’
‘Bound?’ said Eteoneus in his ear.
‘It’s not necessary,’ said Yellowhead. It was a loathsome question: either answer was an outrage.
There was no need to lead her. She went with Eteoneus. There was noise and trouble and tears enough about roping up the others and it felt long to Yellowhead before it was over. He kept his eyes off Helen. What should his eyes say to hers? Yet how could they say nothing? He busied himself picking out the men who were to be the prisoners’ escort.
At last. The women and, for the moment, the problem were gone.
‘Come on, lads,’ he said. ‘We must be busy again. We must go right through the castle and meet the others. Don’t fancy it’s all over.’
He longed to be fighting again. He would fight as he’d never fought before. Perhaps he would be killed. Then the army could do what they pleased with her. For that dim and mostly comfortable picture of a future which hovers before most men’s eyes had vanished.
III
The first thing Yellowhead knew next morning was the burning of the cut above his knee. Then he stretched and felt the after-battle ache in every muscle; swallowed once or twice and found he was very thirsty; sat up, and found his elbow was bruised. The door of the hut was open and he could tell by the light that it was hours after sunrise. Two thoughts hung in his mind: the war is over—Helen is here. Not much emotion about either.
He got up, grunting a little, rubbed his eyes, and went out into the open. Inland, he saw the smoke hanging in still air above the ruins of Troy, and, lower down, innumerable birds. Everything was shockingly quiet. The army must be sleeping late.
Eteoneus, limping a little and wearing a bandage on his right hand, came towards him.
‘Have you any water left?’ said Menelaus. ‘My throat’s as dry as that sand.’
‘You’ll have to have wine in it, Yellowhead Menelaus. We’ve wine enough to swim in, but we’re nearly out of water.’
Menelaus made a face. ‘Make it as weak as you can,’ he said.
Eteoneus limped away and returned with the cup. Both went into the King’s hut and Eteoneus pulled the door to.
‘What did you do that for?’ said Yellowhead.
‘We have to talk, Menelaus.’
‘Talk? I think I’ll sleep again.’
‘Look,’ said Eteoneus, ‘here’s something you ought to know. When Agathocles brought all our share of the women down last night, he penned the rest of them in the big hut where we’ve been keeping the horses. He picketed the horses outside—safe enough now. But he put the Queen by herself in the hut beyond this.’
‘Queen, you call her? How do you know she’s going to be a queen much longer? I haven’t given any orders. I haven
’t made up my mind.’
‘No, but the men have.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That’s what they call her. And they call her Daughter of Zeus. And they saluted her hut when they went past it.’
‘Well, of all the—’
‘Listen, Menelaus. It’s no use at all thinking about your anger. You can’t treat her as anything but your Queen. The men won’t stand it.’
‘But, gates of Hades, I thought the whole army was longing for her blood! After all they’ve been through because of her.’
‘The army in general, yes. But not our own Spartans. She’s still the Queen to them.’
‘That? That faded, fat, old trot? Paris’s cast-off whore and the gods know whose besides? Are they mad? What’s Helen to them? Has everyone forgotten that it’s I who am her husband and her king, and their king too, curse them?’
‘If you want me to answer that, I must say something that’s not to your liking.’
‘Say what you please.’
‘You said you were her husband and their king. They’d say you are their king only because you’re her husband. You’re not of the blood royal of Sparta. You became their king by marrying her. Your kingship hangs on her queenship.’
Yellowhead snatched up an empty scabbard and hit savagely three or four times at a wasp that was hovering above a spilled wine-drop. ‘Cursed, cursed creature!’ he yelled. ‘Can’t I kill even you? Perhaps you’re sacred too. Perhaps Eteoneus here will cut my throat if I swot you. There! There!’
He did not get the wasp. When he sat down again he was sweating.
‘I knew it wouldn’t please you,’ said Eteoneus, ‘but—’
