A Thousand Ships(38)

‘It cannot be me,’ he said. ‘How could I choose between my wife and my daughters? No husband or father could do such a thing.’

‘Then give me my ball,’ said Aphrodite, her tiny shell-like teeth gritted.

‘It’s an apple,’ Athene said. ‘And it’s mine.’

‘How presumptuous you both are,’ Hera said. ‘I’m holding it.’

‘Because you snatched it away from me!’ Athene cried.

There was a shimmering and the goddesses felt the sands shift beneath them. Had Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, joined the debate? The gods were no longer crowded around them. Rather, they saw they were surrounded by bright cloud, and then felt new, rockier ground beneath their feet. The cloud thinned, and they found themselves on a hillside, dark green pines all around and above them.

‘Where are we?’ asked Aphrodite.

‘Mount Ida, I think,’ replied Athene, as she looked around her and noticed the towers of a citadel across the plains beneath the mountain. ‘Isn’t that Troy?’

Hera shrugged. Who cared about Troy?

*

The young man appeared in front of them as though they had dreamed him into existence. Locks of black hair framed his forehead and his pointed cap sat slightly to one side, giving him a disreputable air.

‘Who are you?’ demanded Hera.

‘Paris, son of Priam,’ the man replied. His tone almost hid the confusion he felt in an environment both familiar and alien. Moments earlier he had been tending his herd in the meadows which skirted the bottom of Mount Ida. Now, unaccountably, he was in a dark glade which he had never noticed before. And from the view, he was near the top of the mountain, except that the air was too warm for that to be true. And now three women – slightly too big, and glowing faintly golden, as though lit from within – were staring at him. He knew they must be goddesses.

‘You are to be our judge,’ said Aphrodite. She had no doubt that a mortal man would think her the most beautiful. And if he didn’t, she would destroy him in a beat of his pitiful human heart.

‘Judge? What am I to judge, madam?’ said Paris.

‘This apple says it is for the most beautiful,’ Athene said, jabbing her finger at the apple in Hera’s grasp. ‘Give it to him,’ she said. ‘It’s what Zeus has decided.’

Hera sighed and beckoned the boy towards her. ‘Here,’ she said, tossing the apple into his hands. ‘You must decide to whom the apple rightfully belongs.’

‘Me?’ said Paris. For a moment, he had been wondering if his cattle were safe, unguarded on the slopes beneath him. But now if he’d heard the roar of mountain lions or the howl of wolves, he wouldn’t have moved a muscle. He turned the apple round, admiring its gleaming warmth. No wonder they were arguing over such a lovely, solid trinket. He saw the letters engraved on its flesh: ‘For the most beautiful’. He felt a brief spasm of sadness that the writer had used the feminine ending: ‘kalliste’. Had it read ‘kallisto’, he would certainly have kept it for himself.

‘Yes,’ said Aphrodite, who recognized desire when she saw it. ‘It is very pretty, isn’t it?’

‘As are you three ladies,’ Paris said, with practised gallantry.

‘We’ve heard it,’ said Athene. ‘Now choose.’

Paris looked from one face to the other in genuine perplexity. Aphrodite, of course, was utterly beautiful, as everyone had always told him. Her clothes seemed to strain over her breasts, clinging to her flesh in such a way that his eye was drawn down from her perfect face, no matter how much he wanted to gaze at it. He could imagine wrapping his hand in her honeyed hair, and feeling her body pressed against his own, her mouth opening beneath him, and then he could imagine nothing else. Of course he would give the apple to her. She was astonishing.

But then Hera cleared her throat, and the connection was broken. Not broken exactly, but temporarily dispelled. Hera was tall, he noticed, now she was standing between Aphrodite and Athene. Tall and elegant and somehow powerful, as though she might reach across to him and pick him up, before dashing him against a rock. The daintiness of her wrists and ankles made this seem an oddly alluring prospect. Perhaps he did not want to make her angry, he thought suddenly. And then stopped when he realized that he hadn’t thought anything of the kind. The words had simply popped into his mind, as though he had heard them. Yet no one had spoken. He stared at her mouth as though the trick might reveal itself, but it did not.

And then on his left, there was the most surprising of the three. Troy had a statue of Athene in a temple on the citadel. Larger than life-size, it had a forbidding aspect, the clean, crisp face of a woman who would strangle you with her bare hands so you didn’t bleed on her dress. But the goddess herself, now she was standing a few feet in front of him, was something else entirely. The forbidding expression was there alright, but the face which wore it looked so young that it shifted from something awe-inspiring to something charming. She was like the tomboy sister of a friend, who you grew up treating as just another boy, and then one day noticed she was turning into an intensely desirable woman who knew she was too good for you. In that moment, Paris thought he would give a great deal to become good enough for her.

Aphrodite stamped a small foot. ‘She said you have to choose, and you do,’ she said. The words seemed to slither across the ground between them and wrap themselves around him like snakes. ‘Who does the apple belong to?’