I knew what she meant: You’re Lord Alcimus’s wife. It was all very well for a lady to bathe the sick in her own home—that was perfectly right and proper—but to perform the same menial task in a hospital, to choose, actually choose, the work of a slave? It was only what she’d been wanting to say ever since I pulled the pestle and mortar towards me.
“Go on,” I said. “Shoo.”
I fetched a bucket and some rags and set to work, stripping off the stinking tunic and loincloth, rubbing the wet rag in great sweeps across his body. The water in the bucket changed colour rapidly as I worked. Overhead, the canvas flapped and strained, but I was getting used to that; I no longer feared the entire tent was about to take off. Once or twice, Thersites cried out—more, I thought, from the frustration of not being able to catch the invisible objects in front of him than from any real pain. His body was covered in bruises, some purple, some yellow, some blue around the edges with a pale cream centre—taken together they formed a visual record of the last few weeks of Thersites’s life. He kept up a constant gabbling; the few snatches of speech I understood were typical of the man, foul-mouthed, aggressive, obsessed with shit, filth, blood and pus. It was extraordinary how many of his insults involved boils: boils, blains, blebs, wens, pustules, chancres and sores. Where did it come from, I wondered, this preoccupation with diseased skin? But then I rolled him over. One glance at his backside and I wondered no more.
I straightened up and beckoned Ritsa; I wanted to ask her advice about a poultice for after I’d cleaned the boils. Wiping her hands on the sides of her apron, she joined me at the foot of the bed.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked.
Still lying facedown, Thersites twisted round and peered over his shoulder. “Oh, you. Thrown you out, has he?”
I ignored him while Ritsa and I considered how best to bring the boils to a head.
“Oi, you!” Drunken arrogance, spoiling for a fight. “I’m talking to you. Has he thrown you out?”
It was a waste of time getting upset by anything Thersites said. He hated women, especially the young, pretty girls whom the kings reserved for their own use. He particularly resented women like me—the prizes of honour—because we were as far out of his reach as goddesses. Though even with the common women round the cooking fires he must often have found himself elbowed aside by stronger men. I wondered how many of his bruises came from those encounters. But any sympathy I’d ever felt for him was long gone. I added salt to the water and gave his arse a good scrub.
“Ow! Fucking bitch!”
“It’s for your own good.”
“Fucking hurts—and I can’t lie on me back.”
“Lie on your belly, then.”
When I came back an hour later, he was curled up on his side, dozing, though he jerked awake when I set the platter down beside him. Ignoring the food, he went straight for the wine, only to spit the first mouthful out. “Is this the best you can do? Virgin’s piss.”
“If you don’t want it, there’s plenty who will.”
He went on grumbling, but eventually settled down to eat. The food was good. Machaon insisted on that.
Machaon himself came in a few minutes later, examined the boils and asked about the snatching movements. “White things,” Thersites said. “Little white things flitting about.”
Machaon turned to Ritsa, reeled off a list of instructions for tackling the boils, then looked down at Thersites. “And no strong wine.”
“Fat chance of that in here. Cows.”
“You keep a civil tongue in your head.”
After a few more instructions about saltwater washes and the various poultices Ritsa might try, he bowed low to me and left. The bow amused me. The first time I met Machaon, I’d been a slave in Agamemnon’s compound, sent to help in the hospital because it was overcrowded, the nurses barely able to cope with each day’s influx of wounded. Within minutes of meeting me—and it had been a warm welcome—Machaon, quite unselfconsciously, had hitched up his tunic and given his balls a good scratch—exactly as he might have done if he’d been alone. Because he was alone. A slave counts for no more than a bed or a chair.
But now, he bowed.
Following Ritsa back to the bench, I thought perhaps it was time I went to see Cassandra.
“Yes, of course,” Ritsa said. “Just let me finish this.” She was working on a kaolin poultice. “You’ll have seen them all soon, the Trojan women.”
I nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.”
“Including Helen.”
“Now who told you that?”
“Oh, one of the girls.”
Ritsa went out of her way to help the common women; her goose-fat jar came in useful after many a rough night, and I’ve no doubt she helped in other ways as well. I’d noticed the hospital kept a very large store of pennyroyal, and there were whole beds of it growing in patches of rough ground behind the huts, though as far as I knew it was of no use whatsoever in the treatment of wounded men, but properly prepared it could end an unwanted pregnancy.
“You don’t approve,” I said. “Me seeing Helen.”
“Not my business.”
I explained about my sister—and then I mentioned Helen’s bruises.
“She’s not your responsibility,” Ritsa said. “Anyway, let him kill her, it’s no more than she deserves.”
Ritsa: the kindest of women, and yet she shared the universal hatred of Helen.
“She was kind to me after my mother died—when I was in Troy and I didn’t have you.”
She nodded, though her mouth remained hard. Neither of us wanted this meeting to end in a pointless argument over Helen, so we chatted, laughed and joked, as she finished making the poultice for Thersites’s backside. “There, that can go in the oven now.” She wiped the kaolin from her hands on the sacking cloth round her waist. “Let him have his sleep out first.”
“What do you think’s wrong with him?”
“Wickedness.”
There was no answering that. We checked to make sure he was still asleep, then I followed Ritsa across the small yard at the side of Agamemnon’s hall. Once, this area would have been full of tethered animals waiting to be slaughtered. Hens, geese, ducks too. I remembered particularly a flock of hens ruled over by a white cockerel with a blood-red comb whose crowing had woken the whole compound every morning an hour before dawn. Now, the chickens were gone, and in their place strutted half a dozen crows, naked eyes glinting as we approached. We were walking rapidly, talking as we went, and yet they scarcely bothered to lift their wings and flap out of the way. Crows were everywhere now, and they seemed so arrogant, so prosperous…Almost as if they were taking over.
Cassandra’s hut was surprisingly large and—as I saw when Ritsa opened the door and ushered me inside—extremely well furnished. Rugs, cushions, lamps—and, on the wall facing the door, a very fine tapestry: Artemis, the Lady of Animals, hunting with dogs. No Cassandra, though. I glanced at Ritsa, who put a finger to her lips and led me along the passage to a room at the end. There, lying fast asleep on the bed, was Cassandra, her unbound hair spread across the pillow, and, lying beside her with his head on her breast, a really rather beautiful young man. My heart thumped with shock, but then I realized this must be her twin brother, Helenus. The man who under torture had betrayed the details of Troy’s internal defences. Helenus was Trojan; he was male—so why was he still alive? Perhaps because his life was part of the bargain he’d struck with Odysseus. That was possible—or perhaps the Greeks just didn’t see him as a man. His betrayal of his father and his city didn’t seem to be weighing heavily on him. He was as deeply asleep as Cassandra, his upper lip making a little popping sound on every exhaled breath.