by C. S. Lewis
‘It was the wasp that put me out of patience,’ said Yellowhead. ‘Do you think I’m such a fool as not to know how I got my own throne? Do you think that galls me? I thought you knew me better. Of course they’re right; in law. But no one ever takes notice of these things once a marriage has been made.’
Eteoneus said nothing.
‘Do you mean,’ said Yellowhead, ‘that they’ve been thinking that way all the time?’
‘It never came up before. How should it? But they never forgot about her being the daughter of the highest god.’
‘Do you believe it?’
‘Till I know what it pleases the gods to have said about it, I’ll keep my tongue between my teeth.’
‘And then,’ said Yellowhead, jabbing once more at the wasp, ‘there’s this. If she was really the daughter of Zeus she wouldn’t be the daughter of Tyndareus. She’d be no nearer the true line than I am.’
‘I suppose they’d think Zeus a greater king than either you or Tyndareus.’
‘And so would you,’ said Yellowhead, grinning.
‘Yes,’ said Eteoneus. Then, ‘I’ve had to speak out, Son of Atreus. It’s a question of my own life as well as yours. If you set our men fighting-mad against you, you know very well I’ll be with you back to back, and they won’t slit your throat till they’ve slit mine.’
A loud, rich, happy voice, a voice like an uncle’s, was heard singing outside. The door opened. There stood Agamemnon. He was in his best armour, all the bronze newly polished, and the cloak on his shoulders was scarlet, and his beard gleaming with sweet oil. The other two looked like beggars in his presence. Eteoneus rose and bowed to the King of Men. Yellowhead nodded to his brother.
‘Well, Yellowhead,’ said Agamemnon, ‘how are you? Send your squire for some wine.’ He strode into the hut and ruffled the curls on his brother’s head as if they were a child’s. ‘What cheer? You don’t look like a sacker of cities. Moping? Haven’t we won a victory? And got your prize back, eh?’ He gave a chuckle that shook the whole of his big chest.
‘What are you laughing at?’ said Yellowhead.
‘Ah, the wine,’ said Agamemnon, taking the cup from Eteoneus’s hand. He drank at length, put the cup down, sucked his wet moustache, and said, ‘No wonder you’re glum, brother. I’ve seen our prize. Took a look into her hut. Gods!’ He threw his head back and laughed his fill.
‘I don’t know that you and I have any need to talk about my wife,’ said Yellowhead.
‘Indeed we have,’ said Agamemnon. ‘For the matter of that, it might have been better if we’d talked about her before you married. I might have given you some advice. You don’t know how to handle women. When a man does know, there’s never any trouble. Look at me now. Ever heard of Clytemnestra giving me any trouble? She knows better.’
‘You said we had to talk now, not all those years ago.’
‘I’m coming to that. The question is what’s to be done about this woman. And, by the way, what do you want to do?’
‘I haven’t made up my mind. I suppose it’s my own business.’
‘Not entirely. The army has made up its mind, you see.’
‘What’s it to do with them?’
‘Will you never grow up? Haven’t they been told all these years that she’s the cause of the whole thing—of their friends’ deaths and their own wounds and the gods only know what troubles waiting for them when they get home? Didn’t we keep on telling them we were fighting to get Helen back? Don’t they want to make her pay for it?’
‘It would be far truer to say they were fighting for me. Fighting to get me my wife. The gods know that’s true. Don’t rub that wound. I wouldn’t blame the army if they killed me. I didn’t want it this way. I’d rather have gone with a handful of my own men and taken my chance. Even when we got here I tried to settle it by a single combat. You know I did. But if it comes to—’
‘There, there, there, Yellowhead. Don’t start blaming yourself all over again. We’ve heard it before. And if it’s any comfort to you, I see no harm in telling you (now the thing’s over) that you weren’t quite as important in starting the war as you seem to think. Can’t you understand that Troy had to be crushed? We couldn’t go on having her sitting at the gate to the Euxine, levying tolls on Greek ships and sinking Greek ships and putting up the price of corn. The war had to come.’
‘Do you mean I—and Helen—were just pretexts? If I’d thought—’
‘Brother, you make everything so childishly simple. Of course I wanted to avenge your honour, and the honour of Greece. I was bound to by my oaths. And I also knew—all the Greek kings who had any sense knew—that we had to make an end of Troy. But it was a windfall—a gift from the gods—that Paris ran off with your wife at exactly the right moment.’
‘Then I’d thank you to have told the army the truth at the very outset.’
‘My boy, we told them the part of the truth that they would care about. Avenging a rape and recovering the most beautiful woman in the world—that’s the sort of thing the troops can understand and will fight for. What would be the use of talking to them about the corn-trade? You’ll never make a general.’
‘I’ll have some wine too, Eteoneus,’ said Yellowhead. He drank it fiercely when it was brought and said nothing.
‘And now,’ continued Agamemnon, ‘now they’ve got her, they’ll want to see her killed. Probably want to cut her throat on Achilles’s tomb.’
‘Agamemnon,’ said Eteoneus, ‘I don’t know what Menelaus means to do. But the rest of us Spartans will fight if there’s any attempt to kill the Queen.’
‘And you think I’d sit by and watch?’ said Menelaus, looking angrily at him. ‘If it comes to fighting, I’ll be your leader still.’
‘This is very pretty,’ said Agamemnon. ‘But you are both so hasty. I came, Yellowhead, to tell you that the army will almost certainly demand Helen for the priest’s knife. I half-expected you’d say “Good riddance” and hand her over. But then I’d have had to tell you something else. When they see her, as she now is, I don’t think they’ll believe it is Helen at all. That’s the real danger. They’ll think you have a beautiful Helen—the Helen of their dreams—safely hidden away. There’ll be a meeting. And you’ll be the man they’ll go for.’
‘Do they expect a girl to look the same after ten years?’ said Yellowhead.
‘Well, I was a bit surprised when I saw her myself,’ said Agamemnon. ‘And I’ve a notion that you were too.’ (He repeated his detestable chuckle.) ‘Of course we may pass some other prisoner off as Helen. There are some remarkably pretty girls. Or even if they weren’t quite convinced, it might keep them quiet; provided they thought the real Helen was unobtainable. So it all comes to this. If you want you and your Spartans and the woman to be safe, there’s only one way. You must all embark quietly tonight and leave me to play my hand alone. I’ll do better without you.’
‘You’ll have done better without me all your life.’
‘Not a bit, not a bit. I go home as the Sacker of Troy. Think of Orestes growing up with that to back him! Think of the husbands I’ll be able to get for my girls! Poor Clytemnestra will like it too. I shall be a happy man.’
IV
I only want justice. And to be let alone. From the very beginning, from the day I married Helen down to this moment, who can say I’ve done him a wrong? I had a right to marry her. Tyndareus gave her to me. He even asked the girl herself and she made no objection. What fault could she find in me after I was her husband? I never struck her. I never raped her. I very seldom even had one of the house-girls to my bed, and no sensible woman makes a fuss about that. Did I ever take her child from her and sacrifice it to the storm-gods? Yet Agamemnon does that, and has a faithful, obedient wife.
Did I ever work my way into another man’s house and steal his woman? Paris does that to me. I try to have my revenge in the right way, single combat before both armies. Then there’s some divine interference, a kind of black-out—I don’t know
what happened to me—and he has escaped. I was winning. He was as good as a dead man if I’d had two minutes more. Why do the gods never interfere on the side of the man who was wronged?
I never fought against gods as Diomede did, or says he did. I never turned against our own side and worked for the defeat of the Greeks, like Achilles. And now he’s a god and they make his tomb an altar. I never shirked like Odysseus, I never committed sacrilege like Odysseus. And now he’s the real captain of them all—Agamemnon for all his winks and knowingness couldn’t rule the army for a day without him—and I’m nothing.
Nothing and nobody. I thought I was the King of Sparta. Apparently I’m the only one who ever thought so. I am simply that woman’s head servant. I’m to fight her wars and collect her tribute and do all her work, but she’s the Queen. She can turn whore, turn traitress, turn Trojan. That makes no difference. The moment she’s in our camp she is Queen just as before. All the archers and horseboys can tell me to mend my manners and take care I treat her majesty with proper respect. Even Eteoneus—my own sworn brother—taunts me with being no true king. Then next moment he says he’ll die with me if the Spartans decide I’d better be murdered. I wonder. Probably he’s a traitor too. Perhaps he’s this raddled queen’s next lover.
Not a king. It’s worse than that. I’m not even a freeman. Any hired man, any peddlar, any beggar, would be allowed to teach his own wife a lesson, if she’d been false to him, in the way he thought best. For me it’s ‘Hands off. She’s the Queen, the Daughter of Zeus.’
And then comes Agamemnon sneering—just as he always did ever since we were boys—and making jokes because she’s lost her beauty. What right has he to talk to me about her like that? I wonder what his own Clytemnestra looks like now. Ten years, ten years. And they must have had short commons in Troy for some time. Unhealthy too, cooped up inside the walls. Lucky there seems to have been no plague. And who knows how those barbarians treated her once the war began to turn against them? By Hera, I must find out about that. When I can talk to her. Can I talk to her? How would I begin?
Eteoneus worships her, and Agamemnon jeers at her, and the army wants to cut her throat. Whose woman is she? Whose business is she? Everyone’s except mine, it seems. I count for nothing. I’m a bit of her property and she’s a bit of everyone else’s.
I’ve been a puppet in a war about corn-ships.
I wonder what she’s thinking herself. Alone all those hours in that hut. Wondering and wondering, no doubt. Unless she’s giving an audience to Eteoneus.
Shall we get away safely tonight? We’ve done all we can do by daylight. Nothing to do but wait.
Perhaps it would be best if the army got wind of it and we were all killed, fighting, on the beach. She and Eteoneus would see there’s one thing I can still do. I’d kill her before they took her. Punish her and save her with one stroke.
Curse these flies.
V
(Later. Landed in Egypt and entertained by an Egyptian.)
‘I’m sorry you’ve asked for that, Father,’ said Menelaus, ‘but you said it to spare me. Indeed, indeed, the woman’s not worth your having.’
‘The cold water a man wants is better than the wine he’s no taste for,’ said the old man.
‘I’d give something better than such cold water. I beseech you to accept this cup. The Trojan king drank from it himself.’
‘Will you deny me the woman, Guest?’ said the old man, still smiling.
‘You must pardon me, Father,’ said Menelaus. ‘I’d be ashamed—’
‘She’s the thing I ask for.’
‘Curse these barbarians and their ways,’ thought Menelaus to himself. ‘Is this a courtesy of theirs? Is it the rule always to ask for something of no value?’
‘You will not deny me surely?’ said his host, still not looking at Helen, but looking sidelong at Menelaus.
‘He really wants her,’ Menelaus thought. It began to make him angry.
‘If you won’t give her,’ said the Egyptian, a little scornfully, ‘perhaps you’ll sell?’
Menelaus felt his face reddening. He had found a reason for his anger now: it accordingly grew hotter. The man was insulting him.
‘I tell you the woman’s not for giving,’ he said. ‘And a thousand times not for selling.’
The old man showed no anger—could that smooth, brown face ever show it?—and kept on smiling.
‘Ah,’ he said at last, drawing it out very long. ‘You should have told me. She is perhaps your old nurse or—’
‘She’s my wife,’ Menelaus shouted. The words came out of his mouth, loud, boyish, and ridiculous; he hadn’t meant to say them at all. He darted his eyes round the room. If anyone laughed he’d kill them. But all the Egyptian faces were grave, though anyone could see that the minds within them were mocking him. His own men sat with their eyes on the floor. They were ashamed of him.
‘Stranger,’ said the old man, ‘are you sure that woman is your wife?’
Menelaus glanced sharply towards Helen, half-believing for the moment that these foreign wizards might have played some trick. The glance was so quick that it caught hers and for the first time their eyes met. And indeed she was changed. He surprised a look of what seemed to be, of all things, joy. In the name of the House of Hades, why? It passed in an instant; the set desolation returned. But now his host was speaking again.
‘I know very well who your wife is, Menelaus, son of Atreus. You married Helen Tyndareus. And that woman is not she.’
‘But this is madness,’ said Menelaus. ‘Do you think I don’t know?’
‘That is indeed what I think,’ replied the old man, now wholly grave. ‘Your wife never went to Troy. The gods have played a trick with you. That woman was in Troy. That woman lay in Paris’s bed. Helen was caught away.’
‘Who is that, then?’ asked Menelaus.
‘Ah, who could answer? It is a thing—it will soon go away—such things sometimes go about the Earth for a while. No one knows what they are.’
‘You are making fun of me,’ said Menelaus. He did not think so; still less did he believe what he was told. He thought he was out of his right mind; drunk perhaps, or else the wine had been drugged.
‘It is no wonder if you say that,’ replied the host. ‘But you will not say it when I have shown you the real Helen.’
Menelaus sat still. He had the sense that some outrage was being done to him. One could not argue with these foreign devils. He had never been clever. If Odysseus had been here he would have known what to say. Meanwhile the musicians resumed their playing. The slaves, cat-footed, were moving about. They were moving the lights all into one place, over on the far side near a doorway, so that the rest of the large hall grew darker and darker and one looked painfully at the glare of the clustered candles. The music went on.
‘Daughter of Leda, come forth,’ said the old man.
And at once it came. Out of the darkness of the doorway
[The manuscript ends here.]
NOTES ON AFTER TEN YEARS
I
ROGER LANCELYN GREEN
This story of Helen and Menelaus after the fall of Troy was started, and the first chapter written in, I think, 1959—before Lewis’s visit to Greece. It began, as Lewis wrote that the Narnian stories began and grew, from ‘seeing pictures’ in his mind—the picture of Yellowhead in the Wooden Horse and the realisation of what he and the rest must have experienced during almost twenty-four hours of claustrophobia, discomfort, and danger. I remember him reading to me the first chapter, and the thrill of the growing knowledge of where we were and who Yellowhead was.
But Lewis had not worked out any plot for the rest of the story. We discussed all the legends of Helen and Menelaus that either of us knew—and I was rather ‘up’ in Trojan matters at the time, as I was writing my own story The Luck of Troy which ends where Lewis’s begins. I remember pointing out that Menelaus was only King of Sparta on account of his marriage with Helen, who was the heiress of Tyndareus (afte
r the death of Castor and Polydeuces)—a point which Lewis did not know, but seized upon eagerly and used in the next chapters.
He read the rest of the fragment to me in August 1960, after our visit to Greece—and after the death of Joy (his wife). The Egyptian scrap came later still, I think: but after that year Lewis found that he could no longer make up stories—nor go on with this one. It was because of this drying up of the imaginative spring (perhaps the inability to ‘see pictures’ any longer) that he planned to collaborate with me in a new version of my story The Wood That Time Forgot which I had written about 1950 and which Lewis always said was my best—though no publisher would risk it. But this was late 1962 and early 1963—and nothing came of it.
Naturally it is not possible to be certain what Lewis would have done in After Ten Years if he had gone on with it: he did not know himself—and we discussed so many possibilities that I cannot even be certain which he preferred.
The next ‘picture’ after the scene in the Horse was the idea of what Helen must really have looked like after ten years as a captive in besieged Troy. Of course the classical authors—Quintus Smyrnaeus, Tryphiodorus, Apollodorus, etc.—insist on her divine beauty remaining unimpaired. Some authors say that Menelaus drew his sword to kill her after Troy had fallen, then saw her beauty, and the sword fell from his hand; others say that the soldiers were preparing to stone her—but she let fall her veil, and they dropped the stones and worshipped instead of slaying. Her beauty excused all: ‘To Heracles Zeus gave strength, to Helen beauty, which naturally rules over even strength itself,’ wrote Isocrates—and as I pointed out to Lewis, Helen returned to Sparta with Menelaus and was not only the beautiful queen who welcomes Telemachus in the Odyssey, but was worshipped as a goddess, whose shrine may still be seen at Therapnai near Sparta.
However, the scrap of the story set in Egypt is based on the legend, begun by Stesichorus and developed by Euripides in his play Helena, that Helen never went to Troy at all. On the way, she and Paris stopped in Egypt, and the gods fashioned an imitation Helen, an ‘Eidolon’, a thing of air, which Paris took to Troy, thinking it was the real Helen. For this phantom the Greeks fought and Troy fell. On his return (and he took nearly as long to get home as Odysseus) Menelaus visited Egypt; and there the Eidolon vanished and he found the true Helen, lovely and unsullied, and took her back to Sparta with him. (This legend gave Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang the idea for their romance of Helen in Egypt, The World’s Desire, though it was set some years after the end of the Odyssey—a book which Lewis read and admired, even if he did not value it quite as highly as I do.)
