Everywhere you went you were greeted by smells of wet hair and wet wool. Men with their cloaks pulled over their heads huddled round the fires—fires that smoked and spat and threatened to go out altogether. The meat was half cooked, at best; wine was the only reliable comfort, and they were certainly downing plenty of that. No singing, no laughter, no conversation—and the little there was, mainly grumbling. Oh, they’d still have fought for Pyrrhus, even now, if they’d had to—but his claim to know the will of the gods better than Calchas, who was, after all, the army’s chief seer, didn’t sit well with them. Most of them would rather Ebony had been sacrificed.
The rain fell persistently all night. The groups round the fires broke up early, the men staggering off to find whatever comfort they could inside the huts. But in the past few weeks, a considerable amount of storm damage had been done and very little of it repaired. Consequently, leaking roofs added to the general discomfort. When I got back from my walk, I discovered three leaks had started in my own hut, so I fetched buckets from the yard and found a bowl big enough to catch the drips that were falling onto the sideboard. In the midst of all this chaos, I actually sat down and tried to spin, but the wool felt damp and it was full of those annoying little bobbles that are so difficult to get out. From where I sat, I could hear water plopping into the buckets and the bowl, but the plops came at unpredictable intervals, and each made a slightly different noise. That must sound like a very minor irritation but, believe me, after an hour of it I thought I was going mad, so I put the wool to one side and went to bed. The cradle creaked; the baby kicked. I thought I’d never get to sleep, and then, somehow, still listening to the rain, I drifted off.
Just before dawn, I jolted awake and lay, dry-mouthed and panicky, staring into the darkness. For a moment, I couldn’t even remember where I was. I listened, straining to identify whatever it was that had woken me. Alcimus coming in? One of the girls knocking on the door? Then, very slowly, I began to realize that what I was hearing was silence. Of course, it was only the pre-dawn lull that for weeks now had tormented us with a daily renewal of hope—invariably dashed. With any luck, I might manage another hour of sleep before I needed to get up, so I turned onto my side and pulled the covers up to my chin, but I couldn’t settle. The silence went on. And on. There was no sound at all except for the tick-tick of drops falling into the buckets. Even the cradle had stopped creaking.
In the end, I got up, reached for my mantle and went out. All over the compound, doors were opening, dazed-looking men staggering out, blinking at the light. Their movements seemed jerky, stiff, as if they were suits of armour learning to walk. I glanced to my right and saw the girls had tumbled out of the hut and were standing on the steps, looking around them as if they were seeing the place for the first time. The strange thing was, nobody spoke—as if we were all frightened of breaking this infinitely fragile silence.
Then, ripping the soft silk of the air, a man shouted—and instantly others joined in; they danced, they sang, they splashed in puddles until mud caked them to the thigh—and then they ran. Ran headlong to the ships, a stampede there was no stopping, though I heard Automedon yelling at them to stop, to go back. The ships weren’t loaded, two of them needed repairing, they couldn’t just leap on board and start rowing for home. After a while they started to show sense, if dancing and turning cartwheels on the sand is sense. Pyrrhus appeared, looking, with his short, jagged hair, rather like a half-fledged chick. Behind him stood Helenus, both of them red-eyed from the smoke. They must have done the night watch together. They might even have raked through the ashes to collect Priam’s bones.
After talking to Automedon, Pyrrhus went inside to get dressed. Within minutes, all the action had shifted to the beach. The women were left alone in the compound, as we used to be every morning when the men set off for war. It was a strange experience, listening to those shouts of jubilation, trying to imagine what this meant for us. It was obvious what it meant for the Greeks: they were going home. Where were we going? I looked at Andromache. There was nothing for her here now, everybody she’d ever loved was dead, and yet I knew she wouldn’t want to leave. She’d given birth here; her dead lay buried in this ground. That’s home.
All the girls seemed subdued, facing up to the desolation of exile. I kept telling myself nothing was certain yet. And a part of me still expected the wind to start up again at any moment, though I didn’t say that to the others.
In the end, we simply huddled together, listening to the men shouting on the beach. Watching the rain fall.
36
Odysseus was the first to leave. He’d always been the one chafing at the bit; the one most desperate to get home.
I watched Hecuba being led away. The women had all gathered on the beach to bid her farewell, though she scarcely looked up from the gangplank beneath her feet—and, even when safely on board, she stood in the stern gazing out over our heads towards the blackened towers of Troy. We shouted: “Goodbye, good luck!”—waving her into the distance until that pinpoint of white hair was wholly swallowed up in mist.
As the women dispersed, I saw an immensely tall man stalking elegantly through the crowd, like a grey heron in a puddle of ducks. Calchas—it couldn’t be anybody else—but Calchas as I’d never seen him before: no face paint, no scarlet bands, no staff of office. I was about to walk past when he called out a greeting. As I turned to him, I realized I was seeing his face for the first time, meeting him for the first time—that’s how it felt. It was possible to see that he must once have been extremely beautiful, but what really struck me was how shy he was. I’d never noticed that in him before.
After the conventional enquiries had been stumbled through, he said, “I’m going to miss her.”
“Yes, me too.”
We walked on together. Glancing down, I saw he was wearing the same short tunic the Greek fighters wore—which meant that I was also meeting his legs for the first time. They were spindly and pallid from their long confinement underneath ankle-length skirts—altogether, a disgrace to Trojan manhood. Helle’s were better.
“Are you about ready to leave?” I asked.
“I’m not going.”
“Not going?”
“No.”
I looked around at Odysseus’s deserted compound. “But there’ll be nothing here.”
“There’s plenty of food in Priam’s gardens. And I don’t suppose I’ll be here for ever—I expect I’ll move on.” He smiled. “See if I can find a city Achilles didn’t sack…”
“But why?”
“Why am I staying? I want to go back to Troy. I was only—I don’t know…twelve?—when I was taken to the temple. My parents were poor, I didn’t get on with my father, it was a solution of sorts, I suppose—but I didn’t choose it. And now I want to go back.”
“Actually into Troy?”
He shrugged. It wasn’t necessary for me to point out what horrors he’d be facing there; he knew perfectly well.
“I just want to go home,” he said. “Isn’t that what we all want really? To turn time back…?”
“Ye-es, but it’s not usually considered possible.”
“Well, then, I’ll fail.”
We stopped and looked out to sea. At that moment, almost miraculously, the mists parted and we saw Odysseus’s ships just as the men stopped rowing and began to hoist the sails.
“I hope she’ll be all right,” I said.
“Penelope’s kind—or so everybody says.”
“It’s not freedom, though, is it?”