Elektra(50)

‘Where has he fled?’ she asked.

I thought for a moment. ‘When he arrived at Troy, he left a wife behind him,’ I said. ‘Oenone, a nymph of the river. They dwelt in the mountains before he left to seek a different prize.’

She looked at me steadily. ‘Will she help him?’

Oenone. I saw her face, ravaged by tears when he left. Twisted with anger when she learned where he had gone and why. I could see Paris, bleeding and limping up the paths they had walked together once, begging for her healing skills, a decade after he had abandoned her.

I shook my head. ‘She will not.’

Helen looked away.

‘He should have died on that mountain as a baby,’ I said. The words jarred in the gentle breeze. They were not what I meant to say.

‘He will die there today,’ she said.

I gave a stiff, jerky nod.

She reached out her hand and touched my shoulder. I looked at her slender fingers, the gleaming pink oval nails. Her touch was warm. Kind. I wondered why she seemed to be comforting me when it was she who was newly widowed, her position in Troy more precarious as she had no husband to claim her, no brother-in-law to protect her. I had heard it said that if Paris fell, she would be given in marriage to Deiphobus, one of Priam’s few surviving sons, one of my last remaining brothers. How Helen felt about it, I had no idea. But no worry or anxiety creased her forehead, and I could see only sympathy in her eyes.

The names of legend had tussled on the plains before the city for a decade, but now they were all dead. The battles were weary, painful struggles: no glorious fountains of blood churned up in a crimson froth at the wheels of Achilles’ chariot; only men exhausted from a war that seemed to run forever, dragging themselves out, day by day, to fight again.

When it had begun, I had thought the war would end in a mighty conflagration; a huge explosion of violence and savagery, the storming of our gates and the toppling of our towers. But it looked as though it would limp to a close, that the victors would crawl over the heaped-up piles of the dead to extinguish us, that we would close our eyes and bow our heads to the slow and inevitable end.

So, when the Greeks left, it took everyone by surprise. The news reached us across the plains; we gathered at the walls and looked out to a long, empty stretch of sand all the way to the gleaming sea. No ships. The scouts returned, confirming it was true. The army had vanished as abruptly as they had arrived.

My fellow Trojans were dazed, hardly daring to believe it. I watched the incredulous smiles, the gasps of joy pass one to the other, sparking through the crowds. The gates of Troy swung open, and the citizens poured out.

The ground seemed to shift beneath my feet as I followed. I wondered if it would split apart and suck our city down into the bowels of the earth; if we would suffocate in dirt instead of perishing in flames as I had seen, as Hecabe’s dream of her cursed baby had foretold.

The coastal breeze whipped up around me, lifted my hair. I breathed the fresh, salty air into my lungs. Tears prickled my eyes. The ripple and shimmer of the water, the damp sand where the foamy waves lapped at the shore, the tangle of seaweed drifting in clumps – it was mesmerising. I stared and stared until my vision swam with salt water.

When I saw the horse, I felt the sensation of recognition. It was like seeing someone familiar in the distance and then, as they step free of the blinding sunlight, their face becomes clear. So this is it, I thought. A trick. This is how we die at last.

It was a vast construction, towering above us, with its blank face bowed towards the sea. Great planks of wood were bound together in pillars for the legs and then overlapped in carefully shaped layers for the curving swell of its flanks, the long slope of its back and its bent neck. How they had done it, down on this beach with only the timber they could gather was one mystery; why they had done it was the question gripping the tremulously excited gathering. Although its silhouette was lumpen and ungainly, they had taken the care of plaiting together twists of reeds for its mane, of smoothing its shape and making it a thing of startling beauty.

I watched my father, Priam, stooped with age and ravaged by grief, step closer to it. He studied it, walking back and forth along its length, reaching out a hand as though to touch it, and then drawing back at the last moment, unsure. ‘Antenor?’ he said.

Antenor’s counsel was respected in Troy, but I was not the only one to recall how earnestly he had advised my father ten years ago to return Helen to the Greeks with all the gifts we could muster in exchange for peace, and how Priam had turned to Paris and seen the resentment smouldering in his eyes. Antenor had stalked from the palace that day, his cloak flying behind him, his words of wisdom discarded so that Priam’s son could keep his stolen wife.

I thought of all the men that had fallen since that day, and shivered as I felt the cold press of that silent, massed throng, their smoky eyes staring at the horse with us.

‘A gift to the gods,’ Antenor said at last. ‘For their protector, Athena, I wager. They leave it here in her honour to buy her favour for their safe return home.’

Relief rippled through the crowd. These words, so sweet and full of comfort: how everyone longed to believe them, how grateful they all were to the wise Antenor for uttering that glorious phrase, for his faith that the Greeks were truly gone.

‘Let’s take it!’ came the shout from somewhere in the gathered spectators, and it began to echo through them, people nodding vigorously and smiling at the prospect. ‘We will take it into the city; make it our offering to Athena instead, and she will smile on us rather than them.’