A Thousand Ships(28)

12


Calliope


If he tells me to sing one more time, I think I might bite him. The presumption of these men is extraordinary. Does he believe I have nothing else to do with my time than sit around being his muse? His. When did poets forget that they serve the muses, and not the other way around? And if he can remember new lines of verse during his recitations, why can’t he remember to say please?

Does everyone have to die, he asks, plaintive like a child. Perhaps he thought he was writing about one of those other wars. Devastation is what happens in war: it is its nature. I murmur to him in his dreams sometimes (I do have other things to do, but I like how he looks when he sleeps): you knew Achilles would die. You knew Hector would die before him. You knew Patroclus would die. You’ve told their stories before. If you didn’t want to think of men cut down in battle, then why would you want to compose epic verse?

Ah, but now I see the problem. It’s not their deaths he’s upset about. It’s that he knows what’s coming and he’s worrying it will be more tragedy than epic. I watch his chest rising and falling as he grabs a fitful rest. Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences. And those don’t begin and end on a battlefield.

If he truly wants to understand the nature of the epic story I am letting him compose, he needs to accept that the casualties of war aren’t just the ones who die. And that a death off the battlefield can be more noble (more heroic, if he prefers it that way) than one in the midst of fighting. But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she – all the Trojan women – should be memorialized as much as any other person. Their Greek counterparts too. War is not a sport, to be decided in a quick bout on a strip of contested land. It is a web which stretches out to the furthest parts of the world, drawing everyone into itself.

I will teach him this before he leaves my temple. Or he will have no poem at all.





13


The Trojan Women


The high tide was shifting the seaweed fronds against the sand, as the women continued to wait on the rocks. The Greek guards had disappeared a while ago, after one of them had run up to the others from further down the coast, insisting they follow him immediately. But the women didn’t think of trying to escape. What would be the point in gathering their feeble belongings and running? There was nowhere for them to go. The Greek ships lined the bay, drawn up and ready to leave. All they could see that wasn’t now in Greek hands were the smoking remains of their city.

‘You know Achilles would still have fought, even if it hadn’t been for Briseis,’ Hecabe said. ‘He lived to kill, to torment and to torture. It wasn’t enough for him to slaughter my son.’

No one asked her which son. She always meant Hector, even though Achilles had killed many of his brothers too. ‘He had to defile him. Had to make Priam beg for the return of Hector’s body on bended knee. An old man, begging on his knees. That is who Achilles was: he would have fought again alongside the other Greeks, even if Agamemnon had taken his woman and slit her throat where she stood. Butchery was everything he was.’

Cassandra gazed up at the sky, where the gulls were starting to gather and wheel. She had watched them doing the same thing at the same time yesterday. Polyxena had noticed, years ago, that her troubled sister took comfort in repetitive things. The gulls would soon start diving, one after another, into a shoal of fish in the shallow waters.

Further along the shore, above the place where the guards had gone, another cluster of the birds were hovering, waiting. Cassandra already knew why.

‘Do you think that’s true?’ Polyxena asked her mother. ‘Achilles was destined to be a killer?’

Hecabe shrugged her shoulders, but the cool breeze coming off the sea turned it into a shudder. Polyxena unwound her stole – once a fine wool, dyed a bright, saffron yellow before it was smeared with grey streaks – and stood up to wrap it around her mother. She did not expect to be thanked, and Hecabe said nothing.

‘If you think of him like that,’ Polyxena said, ‘it means he had no choice in what he did. So how can we hate him, if he was just acting as the Fates demanded? If he had no more say in his life than you or I?’

‘He had a choice,’ Hecabe replied. ‘To butcher my sons or some other woman’s sons. But slaughter was all he was good for.’

Cassandra nodded, and whispered her words into the sand. ‘He’s not finished, he’s not finished, he’s not finished.’





14


Laodamia


The heat was intense in Phylace, even this early in the day. Nestled in the lower reaches of Thessaly, between the Gulf of Pagasae to the east and the Phthiotis Mountains to the south and west, it was always hot. The sun burned down so relentlessly on Protesilaus’ small kingdom that no trees ever grew tall enough or verdant enough to provide anything more than a spindly, ineffectual shade. The mountains in the distance climbed in sharp, straight zigzags, and Laodamia had often wished she could roam them like a she-goat. It must surely be cooler up there, where the trees grew more thickly. As it was, she felt sweat forming at her temples and on the back of her legs. Her parents had told her bedtime stories when she was a child, and the one that stuck in her mind even now was that of Helios, the sun-god, pausing to rest his horses every day right over the city she called her home.