He shakes his head, slowly shakes it again, then, composing himself, takes Hecuba’s small hand and holds it close to his breast. She responds with an answering pressure of her own. She is sensitive to the slightest shades in him, but he is odd today — she has no idea where all this is leading.
‘You know my story,’ he says softly. ‘You must have heard it a hundred times as a child in your father’s palace, away there in Phrygia, long before you knew that one day you would make the journey here and be my bride.’ He smiles at this: the thought comforts him. It is a fact of such long standing, a story now in itself. ‘I wonder what you thought of it, and of me. Perhaps even then your heart was touched, and what you felt then, as a mere girl, has led to this lifetime we have spent — very lovingly, I think — in one another’s company.’
He raises her hand to his lips, meeting her concentrated, soft-eyed gaze, and glimpsing in it, as from afar, the child he has just evoked: frowning, half-fearful, hanging on the story at whose midpoint his own small life was suspended.
‘Well, it’s a tale every child knows and has heard a hundred times over, from his nurse at bedtime or from some weaver of magic in the marketplace. The beginning. The long-drawn-out and terrifying business of its middle. Then all in an instant — in what is always a surprise, even when the listener knows already what is to come — the turnabout, the happy end. However often he may have heard it the listener sits breathless, his small soul hanging on a breath. In just a moment a miracle will occur, and the little victim, the lost one — me in this case — will be snatched up and happily restored.
‘Imagine, then, what it was like to be that child. To actually stand as I did at the centre of it, of what was not a story, not yet, but a real happening, all noise and smoke and panicky confusion. To know nothing of what is to come and simply be there — one of a horde of wailing infants, some no more than three or four years old, who have been driven like geese out of the blazing citadel, along with rats, mice and a dozen other small, terrified creatures, all squealing underfoot. A rabble of filthy, lice-ridden brats with the mark of the whip across their shoulders, the spawn of beggars, pedlars, scullery maids, stablehands, whores. And smuggled in among them, whimpering and pale, a few little pampered lords such as I was, who’d seen their parents slaughtered, and their brothers laid out with their white throats slashed. All hiding now — smeared with shit to disguise the scent of sweet herbs on their skin — among all those others. Utterly bewildered like them, and waiting, too tired and hungry to be properly afraid, for some bully to come swaggering up, all matted hair and sweat, who has grown tired of slitting bellies and smashing skulls and is ready now for a little harmless fun. Ready to amuse himself by poking ribs, and pushing his thick finger into a mouth, and carrying off this or that one of us to be his slave and plaything, his prize of war.
‘We huddle in groups, half-asleep on our feet. The air’s an oven thick with smoke. It’s past midday. Since the slaughter began, just after dawn, not a drop of water has passed our lips.
‘Some of the smallest among us are blubbering snot and crying for their mothers. Others are too stunned to do more than squat in their own filth. We cling together, all grimed with ashes and streaked with the dried blood of whoever it was, a parent or some kindly neighbour, whose arms we were snatched from. Waiting in the open now for the men whose voices we can hear, in a great roar up there in the city, to descend like wolves and carry us off.
‘A group of guards has been set to watch us. They are idle fellows, some of them bloodied and in bandages, all of them terrifying to a child who has never known any but men whose every move is a response to the fulfilling of his needs. Their rough voices, their hands, their red mouths scare me. They range round the edges of the crowd, pushing and shouting. Even more frightful, when they produce them, are their grins.
‘Occasionally, out of boredom, or the need for a moment’s savage amusement, they toss handfuls of crusts into the crowd, and laugh as the boldest or most desperate of the mob of hungry, half-naked urchins fall upon them, scrabbling in the dirt and lashing out with knuckles and bare feet, howling, biting, gouging. The men holler and urge them on. But when their charges threaten to do one another serious mischief — we are, after all, the property of their masters and not to be damaged — they wade in, all fists themselves, and kick the little combatants to their feet, or haul them up by their hair or the scruff of the neck, holding them like polecats at arm’s distance, wary of teeth, then pitch them back into the mob.
‘And I am one of these snivelling barefoot brats. Six years old and indistinguishable, I hope — my survival depends on it — from the offspring of the lowest scullion. I have just enough sense of the danger I am in to make myself small so as not to attract attention. Some of those I am hiding among are palace slaves. Any one of them might point a finger and name me. Others again, just yesterday, were my playmates, little lords of all the world as I was. We avoid one another now. Turn our eyes away. Put the surging crowd between us.
‘Imagine! To be at one moment the little pampered darling of your father’s court, never more than twenty paces from your nurse or some watchful steward, the pet of your mother’s maidservants — big girls with golden half-moons or butterflies in their ears that I liked to snatch at and jingle — and of slaves who had to approach me on their knees, even when all they were doing was offering a pile of shelled walnuts on a silver salver or a bowl to receive my tinkling piss. With a skin that had never known the touch of any but the finest cotton or silk, and in winter a lambswool undershirt. The possessor of a sleek bay pony, and a pet rabbit, and a wicker cage the size of my fist with a cricket in it to drum and chirp beside my pillow. To be at one moment Podarces, son of Laomedon, King of Troy, and in the next just one of a rabble of slave children, with a smell on me that I had taken till then to be the smell of another order of beings. A foul slave-smell that I clung to now in the hope that it would cling to me, since it was the only thing that could save me from drowning like my brothers, up there in the citadel, in my own blood.’
He sits, shaking his head. All this is so shameful, has for so long been secret in him. When he speaks again it is in a voice she barely knows.
‘Leading away from the town, and from the place below it where we stand waiting in the dust, is a road, narrow, white, winding off across the plain, dwindling away into smoky haze. It looks quiet. It is empty as yet. I stand looking at it. That road leads to slavery — that’s what I tell myself. It’s the road he will drag me down. Slung across his shoulders like a sheep.
‘I look up now and I can still see it. It’s the road my other self went down. To a life where you and I, my dear, have never met, have never found one another. To a life I have lived entirely without you. In the same body perhaps,’ he holds up his arm, ‘with the same loose skin, the same ache in the knee-joints and thumbs. But one that for sixty years has known only drudgery and daily humiliation and blows. And that life too, I have lived, if only in a ghostly way. As a foul-smelling mockery of this one, that at any moment can rise to my nostrils and pluck at my robe and whisper, So there you are, old man Podarces.
‘There are things,’ he says, almost under his breath, ‘that once we have touched them, once they have touched us, we can never throw off, however much we scrub away at ourselves, however high the gods set us. In our nostrils the stench is still there, the old filth sticks. The smell of those others — which was my smell too, the smell of the slave’s life I was being dragged away to — I can never rub off.