A Thousand Ships(29)

Laodamia walked in a loop – out from the palace, down to the city walls, to the road which led away from Phylace towards the sea. There she would wait each day, until the sailors and traders who were coming inland had arrived. How many days did it take a man to sail from Troy to Thessaly? Clipping the island of Lemnos, before crossing the dark Aegean and hugging the coast of Euboea into the Pagasean Gulf. She had the whole route fixed in her mind because in the days before he left, Protesilaus had talked of little else but how he would get home.

‘Don’t cry, little queen,’ he said, as her tears flowed so freely that she thought they would drown her. He reached out his hand – long, slender fingers, better suited to playing the lyre than wielding a sword – and wiped them away with his thumb. ‘I will be back before you have time to miss me. I promise.’

And she nodded, as though she believed him. ‘You must promise me something more,’ she said.

‘Anything,’ he replied.

‘You must promise not to be first,’ she said. His pretty brow – the thing she had loved about him from the beginning, the slight crease between his eyes – was the only sign of his confusion. His mouth continued to make soft, calming sounds, as though he were placating a scared horse.

‘I mean it.’ She wanted to tell him to stop stroking her arms and pay attention to her words. But the torchlight glittered on his golden skin, and she found she could barely pay attention to them herself. ‘You must let your ship lag behind the others, when you land at Troy. Yours must not be the first to make its mooring.’

‘I doubt I will be at the helm of the ship, my love,’ he replied. He felt her stiffen beside him. ‘But I will ask the helmsman to make no haste. I will distract him with talk of sea-monsters and whirlpools.’

‘You aren’t taking me seriously,’ she said. She tried to jerk her arm out of his reach, and remonstrate with him, but she could not. She longed for his touch, even when she had it. ‘You must allow the other men to get off the ship before you. All will be well if you will just stand back a little and let another man off the ship first.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But perhaps the sooner I leave my ship, the sooner I can return to it, and then to you.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, please. That’s not it at all. You cannot be first off the ship, you cannot.’ Her tears spilled out again.

Protesilaus smiled patiently, and ruffled her hair. ‘I said, don’t cry, little queen. Please stop.’

Their bedroom was not large or opulent by the standards of other palaces, she had no doubt. The kingdom was small, the palace was small, and she was small. Or delicate, as Protesilaus laughed. He always said that he would have married her even if she hadn’t been beautiful, because she was the only queen who would fit in his low-roofed home. But the thick walls kept the palace cool: the only cool place in their hot little city. And so they could fill their bedroom with quilts and torches, even as the rest of the kingdom baked in the evening sun. She loved to be there more than anywhere else, tangled up with her husband in their private room.

But when the call came for the suitors of Helen to mass their ships at Aulis, her small, perfect happiness began to unravel. She knew that Protesilaus had once bid for Helen’s hand in marriage, of course. It was before she had known him, so she bore only the slightest grudge. But oh, if only he had not. Because the suitors had all sworn an oath to bring Helen back – if ever she went missing – to whichever of them was named her husband. Otherwise, she could not have been married at all: every Greek king wanted her to be his own. There had to be some consequence for so many competing claims.

The man who eventually took her was no Greek and had sworn nothing. Yet the oath which bound Laodamia’s husband could not be broken. So when Helen disappeared with the prince of Troy, Protesilaus received his orders to join his fellow Greeks and wage war for her return. Because the Spartan king had lost his queen, a hundred queens lost their kings. And Laodamia resented the Greeks at least as much as she resented the Trojans. She had asked for very little in her life: only that her husband be hers, and be safe, and be near.

And now he was none of those things. She knew the moment it happened, days before the messenger arrived with the news she had dreaded above all else. She had always known, she thought, even before she could have put words to the fear. The moment she met Protesilaus, she had somehow known she would lose him. She remembered the warring sensations when her father introduced them: immediate devotion mingled with a desperate presentiment of grief.

She had known as she closed her eyes in his embrace that final time, having travelled with him to his ship so she could wave him off. Again, she begged him to hang back from the sandy shores of Troy, to be last, to be second from last, to be anything but the first Greek to set foot on foreign land. She had hidden her tears from her husband so he would have her smile to take with him. But as soon as she thought he would no longer be able to see, she wept steadily and never stopped. She watched his outline until she could make him out no more, and then she watched his ship until it became a speck. Still, she could not bear to leave the water’s edge, so strong was her sense that once she had turned away from the ocean she had turned away from all happiness. Eventually, slaves steered her back to the palace, her maidservant holding her around the waist so that when she stumbled (unable to see through her tears and the twilight), she would not fall. The poor girl could not see that Laodamia had already fallen and would never get up again.