And you could see it was true: she was dauntless. All this time, her mouth had been working constantly—even after she’d finished speaking, she actually had to pinch her lips together to keep them still. She looked like a frail, gaunt old bird—a storm thrush, perhaps—feathers ruffled by the blast, but still singing, still shouting defiance from its perch. I was struggling to understand her. Every day, I saw how erased by grief Andromache was—and I suppose I’d expected Hecuba to be the same, or worse. But she was nothing like that. Hatred of Helen consumed her. Perhaps she felt the kings were too powerful, too intimidating, to hate—or perhaps she’d always blamed women and exonerated men. Some women are like that. But it was making me rebellious.
I said: “You can’t just blame Helen! It wasn’t Helen who killed Priam—it was Pyrrhus. And who threw Hector’s son off the battlements? Pyrrhus. And who sacrificed Polyxena? Not Helen—Pyrrhus.”
“And what are you going to do about it?” Hecuba asked.
Silence. I had no answer to that. I knew Pyrrhus was far beyond our reach. Instead, I looked around the walls of the hut, and I just wanted to be outside, filling my lungs with clean air—if you could call that scouring wind with its whipped-up grains of sand “clean.” I wanted to be away from the stale smell that emanated from the dirty blankets on her bed; above all, I wanted not to have to hear that incessantly ranting, exhausted voice; and yet, at the same time, I felt pity for her, and a kind of awe.
At last she was silent. She actually ate one of the cakes, dabbing her mouth daintily with the edges of her veil. “Delicious,” she said, waving away another. “Do you know”—turning to me—“I don’t think I ever tasted cakes like that in Troy—and Priam had the best cooks in the world. Though I must say I still like the ginger cake best. Such a strong taste.”
Hecamede looked concerned. “Was it too strong?”
“No, no, perfectly balanced. Not too spicy, not too sweet.” She turned to me again. “And what about you, my dear?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Do I bake? Well, yes, a bit—nothing like Hecamede.”
“But I’m sure you have other talents. They tell me you know quite a lot about herbs?”
“I wouldn’t say a lot.”
“You see—” She paused, looking around the little circle. “I’ve been thinking, about what we could do.”
I felt a prickle of uneasiness as I listened. She seemed to be asking Hecamede to bake a cake for Helen. A cake? For Helen?
And then she said, looking at me: “I know where to find the plants.”
Of course she knew. Like every other great herbarium, the garden at Troy had a gated area set aside for poisonous plants, because—paradoxically—poisonous plants produce some of the most powerful medicines. Administered in minute doses, under careful supervision, these plants can actually save lives. Henbane, wolfbane, foxglove, sweet clover—it sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? Sweet clover—snakeroot, castor-oil plant, strychnine tree…
Hecuba touched my arm. “You’d know which ones to pick?”
I glanced across at Hecamede and saw her realize what we were being asked to do. She reached for Hecuba’s hand. “Why don’t you leave her to the gods?”
“Because leaving things to the gods doesn’t bloody well work! You need to grow up, my girl.”
“Only the gods can judge.”
“Huh! You think the gods care about justice? Where’s the justice in what’s happened to me?”
She turned away from us then, hunching her shoulders like a hawk in the rain. For a moment, there was silence. Then she said: “Amina understands, don’t you?”
Amina nodded. “Yes.”
“Fortunately,” I said, “Amina isn’t allowed out of the women’s hut without me.”
The atmosphere had gone sour. I flared my eyes at Hecamede, asking: How soon can we leave? But then Hecuba turned to face us again and her whole demeanour had changed, almost as if the corrosive fantasy of poisoning Helen—which, I suspected, had been her sole companion during her long, sleepless nights—had fallen away and left her suddenly lighter. “Do you know, I think I might manage another cake.”
There was only one left. When she’d finished, she moistened her finger and picked up the last crumbs from the plate. “And now, I’d like to go for a walk.”
The three of us exchanged glances. We all thought it was nonsense: the wind would blow her away. I actually had visions of her being whirled up into the sky like one of those skeletal brown leaves you see in autumn, but I nodded and helped Hecuba to her feet. She draped her thin arms across Hecamede’s shoulders and mine and then, awkwardly, like a six-legged freak calf, we shuffled towards the door.
Once outside on the veranda, Hecuba stopped dead and I felt a tremor run through her. She was blinking in the harsh light, as if daunted by her own temerity. I half expected her to change her mind, to turn back and say she’d try again another day, but no, she was determined. One or two women who were squatting on the ground grinding corn looked up as she embarked on her perilous journey down the steps. I was terrified she’d fall. In the end, we simply lifted her down—she was no weight at all.
“Where would you like to go?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “The sea. I haven’t been to the sea for years.”
So, keeping as far as we could to the shelter of the huts, we set off. Several times, we had to stop so she could wind her veil round her mouth; the wind was snatching her breath—as it was ours, but she had less breath to spare. Though she might as well not have bothered, because as soon as we left the shelter of the huts, the veil streamed out behind her and she had to let go of me to stop it flying away. Crows circled, their ragged wings black against the white sky. “Look at the buggers!” she said. “Better fed than we are.” And she made a sound that in other circumstances might have been a laugh.
Slowly, very slowly, we got her down onto the beach. By now, we were almost carrying her, our arms crossed over her bent back as she tottered towards the sea. Once her veil came off altogether. Amina chased it across the sand and brought it back, knotting it securely round Hecuba’s neck. On the shoreline, we stopped and watched the waves in their relentless assault on the land, each one failing, falling back, dislodging pebbles that peppered down the slope after it—then, the long, grating sigh of its defeat. But already, beyond the breakers, the sea was flexing its powerful shoulders for the next attack. Hecuba stared at the black, beaked ships that were lined up on the beach like a flock of predatory birds, seeing probably for the first time the forces that had destroyed her life. I was afraid she’d look along the beach to where crows and seagulls still squabbled over Priam’s body, but instead she drew a shuddering breath and turned to face inland.
A group of women had gathered a short distance away, slaves who’d come running out of Odysseus’s huts to see their former queen, but she looked over their heads at the ruined city. I followed her gaze and saw, through her eyes, Troy’s black and broken towers, like the fingers of a half-buried hand pointing accusingly at the sky. I waited for Hecuba to speak, but she said nothing. Perhaps, confronted by this sight, words felt like such debased currency she couldn’t be bothered to use them anymore. Somewhere deep in her throat a wordless sound was forming. I didn’t hear it; I felt it—running from her neck and shoulders down into my arm. And before I realized what was happening, she’d slipped from my grasp and fallen to her knees. She crouched on the hard sand and suddenly the grief burst out of her. She raised her face to the sky and shouted for Priam, and then for Hector and for all her other dead sons. And then again for Priam. Priam. Priam. She was pulling out chunks of hair, clawing her cheeks, beating the ground, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead.