At last, hearing voices outside the hut—the compound was starting to come to life—I stirred. “May I see your weaving?”
She brightened. “Yes, of course.”
Jumping to her feet, she caught my arm and almost dragged me across the room. Helen’s weaving was unlike anybody else’s. Most women use motifs that are common in the culture—often stylized flowers and leaves, or incidents in the lives of the gods—but Helen’s designs were nothing if not original. She was weaving a history of the war, telling the story in wool and silk just as the bards sing it in words and music. I assumed she’d still be doing that and, sure enough, taking shape on her loom was a gigantic wooden horse. Inside its belly were two long rows of curled-up foetuses; man-babies lying in a womb.
I stood there taking it in, my silence probably a better compliment than any words would have been.
“This is for Menelaus’s palace, I suppose?”
“Who knows?”
Something in her voice made me turn to look at her. The light from the lamps she’d been working by fell full onto her face, but it wasn’t that familiar perfection which caught my eye; it was the necklace of circular bruises round her throat. Many different shades, I noticed—being, I’m afraid, something of a connoisseur in such matters—from angry red fingermarks all the way through blue and black to the mottled yellow and purple of old injuries. All of them on her neck and throat—he hadn’t touched her face. He’d throttled her as he was fucking her. As you would.
Instinctively, she started to wrap the blue shawl more tightly round her neck, but then let her hand fall, meeting my gaze with that too steady, skinned look I’d seen so many times before—and since. She was ashamed, while knowing she had no reason to be ashamed. She wanted to hide the bruises—and yet, at the same time, she wanted me to see.
“Oh, Helen.”
“Well, you know, he gets drunk and…It’s just one long list of names.”
“Names?”
“People who’ve died. Patroclus, Achilles, Ajax—”
“But that was suicide.”
“Doesn’t matter, he still blames me. Nestor’s son—what’s his name? Antilochus. Agamemnon—”
“Agamemnon? Last time I looked he was very much alive.”
“Yes, but it’s got very bad between them. He says he’s lost his brother—and what did they fall out over? Me.”
Poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace—and she was really just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over.
“Oh, I know, it’s just grief and it’s natural, but it’s all the time—relentless. And, of course, it’s all my fault. All of it, every single death—my fault. When I was first returned to him after Troy fell he said he was going to kill me. Sometimes I wish he had.” She choked on a laugh. “Except I don’t, of course.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I need to get my hands on some plants.”
“Not poison?”
“No—I’d never get away with it. But there are drugs that make people forget—even if somebody they love dies, they don’t feel it, they don’t cry, they don’t mourn…They don’t get angry. It’s all just—” She swept her hand from side to side. “Smoothed away.”
“I don’t know where you’d get your hands on something like that.”
“Machaon?”
“Well, you could always ask. He’d certainly give you a sleeping draught.”
“No, that’s no good, he’d see through that straightaway. I need him awake—but calm.” She hesitated. “There’s masses of stuff in Troy. In the herb garden there.”
I knew what she was asking. “That’s a long way away. I think Machaon’s your best bet.”
I didn’t blame Helen for wanting to drug Menelaus. When I looked at her, I didn’t see the destructive harpy of the stories and the gossip; I saw a woman fighting for her life.
“He will kill me,” she said.
I shook my head. “If he was going to do that, he’d have done it by now.”
“So, you won’t help me?”
“Ask Machaon.”
That was that. In the end, everything done, everything said, we simply stared at each other. Then she touched me lightly on the arm and led me to the door. As she opened it, the light revealed the full extent of the bruising, which went right down to her breasts. I sensed she wanted to leave me with that sight and I felt myself recoil from her.
“You can’t blame me for trying to survive,” she said, closing the door till it was open no more than a crack. “From what I hear, you’re pretty good at that yourself.”
6
That night, once again, I ate alone. After dinner, instead of waiting up for Alcimus, I went straight to my own room. This was easily the smallest in the hut, just large enough to contain a bed and—recently acquired from the looting of Troy—a cradle. The cradle was so finely carved, so lavishly embellished with ivory and gold, that it could only have belonged to an aristocratic or royal family. Lying down on the bed, I stared up at the roof beams while the baby inside me—who’d been restless all day—settled slowly into its own version of sleep.
Flat on my back like that, I didn’t have to see the cradle. Alcimus had presented it to me with such pride, I knew I couldn’t get rid of it, or even suggest moving it into one of the storage huts, and yet I loathed it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Andromache’s son, the little boy whom Pyrrhus had hurled to his death from the battlements of Troy. I had no logical reason to believe this was his cradle, and yet I knew it was. I felt his small ghost in the room.
It was difficult to sleep with that thought in my head, but I did at last manage to drift off. Only a few moments later, it seemed—though it might have been hours—I was jerked awake by a banging on the door. Getting up too quickly, I felt myself go dizzy, but managed to stumble along the passage. The banging had stopped, but then it started again.
“Coming!” Peering into the darkness, I saw one of the girls standing there, though I couldn’t see which one, until she took a step closer. “Amina. What’s wrong?”
“He’s sent for Andromache.”
She didn’t need to say any more. I got my mantle and stepped across the threshold, a mizzling rain immediately dampening my skin and hair. We scaled along the wall, staggering a little in the gap between two huts where the wind blew with full force off the sea. Amina tapped on the door and one of the girls let us in. I didn’t really know any of them yet, three or four by name, the others not even that. It didn’t help that many of them were still mute. They’d got their pallet beds from beneath the hut where they were stored during the day and arranged them in rows across the room. Each girl had a small rush light by her pillow. As they turned to look at me, the pallid flames illuminated their faces from below—they looked like their own ghosts. A girl called Helle said, “You’re too late, she’s gone.” She sounded spiteful, petulant—the way a small child might sound if her mother had failed to protect her.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I know where to find her.”
I did. I must have crossed paths with half a dozen past selves in the short distance between the women’s hut and the hall.
As I approached, I heard singing, banging of fists on tables, the braying laughter of young men drinking hard to celebrate, or forget. Pyrrhus’s voice rose louder than the rest. I walked along the veranda to the side entrance that led directly into his private apartments. Not much shelter there—as I opened the door, the wind blew me into the room. I looked around. A fire was burning, though the logs were green and smoking badly; my eyes stung. Two chairs faced each other across the hearth. The one opposite me had been Patroclus’s chair. I could see him now, as always, with a couple of dogs asleep at his feet: hunting dogs, twitching and whimpering as they chased imaginary rabbits across dream fields. One of them yelped and its paws scrabbled on the floor. Patroclus laughed and the man in the other chair, whose face I couldn’t see, looked up from his lyre and laughed too. And for a moment, I forgot Andromache waiting in the small room, Pyrrhus drinking himself stupid in the hall, and simply stared at the empty chairs—which in my mind were not empty at all. How powerful the dead are.