A Thousand Ships(10)

Polyxena issued a low, guttural cry, which merged with the chatter of the cormorants and went unheard by their captors. No matter how hard she tried to suppress her grief, she could not help herself. ‘Could this have been avoided?’ she asked her mother. ‘Did Troy have to fall? Was there no point when we could have been saved?’

Cassandra’s shoulders quivered with the effort of not screaming. She shook with the force of her desire to shout that she had told them a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times. And that none of them had listened, not once, not for a heartbeat. They didn’t hear, they couldn’t see, and yet she could see nothing but the future, all the time, forever. Well, not forever. She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.

Hecabe looked down at her daughter and ran her fingers over Polyxena’s hair. She did not notice the thin film of soot it left behind on her palm. She could not look at her hands touching her daughter, knowing as she did that the hands of a Greek would be defiling her before the night came. The only question was which man would have each of her daughters, her daughters-in-law. Who, not if or when.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The gods know, you must ask them.’ And as she looked out at the sea, over the heads of her battered retinue, she realized that one of the Trojan women was missing. ‘Where is Theano?’ she asked.





4


Theano


Theano, wife of Antenor, mother of four sons and one daughter, bent over to light the candle and blinked in its small, smoky flame. Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son. Her tears came from the smoke, and also from the anger which burned at her core, like the wick of the candle she carried to the table and placed in its centre. Her husband sat opposite her, his head in his gnarled hands. She had no pity for him: the war was raging through its tenth year outside the city walls and he was too old to fight. She would have given his remaining life – lived uncomplaining as a widow – to spend a single moment with one of her dead sons.

‘You have given Priam every chance to heed your warnings,’ she said, as Antenor shook his head. His thick grey eyebrows pushed their way out from behind his fingers, and she reached around the candle and pulled his hands down to the table. ‘Every chance,’ she repeated. His filmy eyes met hers, and she wondered if she looked as old and feeble to him as he looked to her: snowy hair, creased skin, etched grief.

‘He refuses to listen,’ her husband said. ‘He cannot see past her.’

His wife spat on the ground. There was only ever one ‘her’ in Troy, and that had been true for ten long years. Ten years that had taken her four most precious jewels.

‘You have served him well,’ she said. ‘Years have passed since you first advised him to return the whore to her husband.’

‘Years,’ Antenor echoed. They had conducted this conversation so many times in the past that it had come to seem to him like a song, in which he no longer had to remember his words, any more than a man had to remember his way home. It was simply a part of him.

‘Priam has been too prideful,’ his wife continued. ‘The goddess has told me, more than once.’

Her husband nodded. Theano had been a priestess of Athene when he first saw her, with her parents in the temple precincts. How many years ago was that? He couldn’t recall. She had been a lithe girl, he remembered, bright-eyed with a sharp intelligence which had, over the years, attenuated to impatience.

‘I made the offering of the robe,’ she reminded him. The women of Troy had embroidered an ornate ceremonial robe for the statue of the goddess, and his wife had dedicated it to her the previous summer. It had done nothing to win Athene’s support away from the Greeks and in favour of the Trojans. They might as well, Theano had whispered as the body of their youngest son was carried back from the battlefield, have offered her a pile of rags, for all the good it had done. Her husband had begged her not to blaspheme, but with only one child – their daughter Crino – left, his wife was in no mood to be told. The goddess was quite clear, Theano said: return Helen to Menelaus. Purge the pollutant from our city. Send ten gold kraters – Priam’s largest and most highly decorated – and ten finely worked red and gold tapestries along with her. Send Paris to abase himself before the man whose wife he had stolen, and beg his forgiveness. If it was unforthcoming, his wife had added, Priam’s over-indulged son would have to pay for his folly with his life. It was not an unreasonable price for taking a man’s wife from her home, overturning generations of tradition, which rightly said that a guest must respect his host.

‘Priam will not force his son to lose face,’ Antenor said.

‘Lose face!’ she snapped. ‘Reputations can only be lost if they have not already been trampled in the mud. Only a deluded man could think Paris has any reputation beyond that of a philanderer and the woman who shares his bed will always be known as a whore.’

‘The king cannot see it.’

‘He will have no choice.’ Theano paused. ‘But you do have a choice.’ The conversation had never turned this way before. She watched her husband’s eyes flicker to hers, barely able to see her expression. ‘You have heard the message, Antenor. You know they will act tonight.’