A Thousand Ships(44)

Oenone’s first response to the sound of her name was to assume she had imagined it. No one had called her by name in ten years. Her son called her ‘Mama’, when he was not lost on the mountains with his beloved herd. Cebren the river god called her ‘Daughter’. The other nymphs used to call her by name, but she had forsaken their company years earlier, unable to bear the shame of having been shunned by her mortal husband. So she thought she must have put her name into the beak of a calling bird, as she had done many times after Paris left. But then again it came.

‘Oenone, please. Please help me.’

This time, there was no mistake. She knew she had heard her name, and she knew whose voice had spoken it. She hurried towards the sound and saw something she had dreamed of a thousand times, first in fear and then in anger. When their love was new, she had loathed Paris to be away from her for long. She worried he would be gored by a mountain boar, or taken by wolves. Over and over again, she saw him lying before her, mortally wounded, and she knew it would take all her healing powers to keep him from the greedy maw of Hades. In the dark hours of the night, she told herself that this was the price to be paid for loving a mortal: the ever-present risk of death. Once he had left and she realized – too late for her dignity – that he was never coming back, she imagined the scene differently. Paris would crawl across the browned pine needles that carpeted her home, pleading for help. Her response varied: sometimes she would magnanimously allow him to beg her pardon and save his life; other times she would watch, unmoved, as his last breath caught in his perfidious throat.

Now the dream was in front of her. Paris’ oiled hair still stuck to his forehead, bristling with sweat. His beautiful face was etched with lines of pain, and his colour – once the same lovely nut-brown as her son – was pallid and greyish. He had fallen forward, his head landing on his arms. His left leg sagged awkwardly, and she saw dark blood seeping through the cloth he had used to bind his wound. His breathing was ragged, and it took a powerful effort for him to summon up the strength to speak.

‘Oenone, I am dying. Without you I will die.’

She looked at the man who lay at her feet, and wondered how she had ever loved him. He was so frail. So human. There was something displeasing about mortals, which gods never spoke about, because they all knew it to be true. They had a strange smell – faint, when they were young, ripening to a stench as they grew old – but always present. It was the odour of death. Even the healthy ones, the uninjured, even children had it, this invisible, indelible mark. And now Paris reeked of it.

‘Please,’ he said.

‘How did you get here?’ she asked.

‘I walked until I could only crawl,’ he said. ‘And then I crawled.’

‘My father let you across.’

‘Yes. He said you might refuse to see me.’

She nodded.

‘But I begged him and he slowed the waters so I could reach you.’

‘You came in vain,’ she said. She had not known this would be her reply until she heard the words. A spasm of pain crossed his face.

‘You could heal me,’ he said. ‘If you chose.’

‘And what if I do not choose?’ she asked. ‘What if I prefer not to staunch your bleeding and tend your wounds? What if I choose to keep my healing herbs for my son, for his goats, for someone who has not betrayed me? What then?’

‘Oenone, don’t say this. Don’t be so angry. It has been more than ten years since I left . . .’ His breath ran out and he coughed, then cried out from the fresh pain.

‘More than ten years since you left me widowed,’ she said. ‘You abandoned me and our son, the son I bore you. You cared nothing for us. Now you crawl back to life, and I am a widow no longer? Did it occur to you once – once – on your journey up here to ask yourself if I might have grown accustomed to my widowhood? If I might first have learned to live with it, and then grown to prefer it? Did you think for a moment of what I might want, how I might feel?’

‘No,’ he said, and a mortal woman would have struggled to hear the sound. ‘I am dying, Oenone. I thought only of that.’

‘And that is why I will not heal you,’ she said. ‘You thought only of yourself. Even now, when you should be prostrate before me—’

‘I am prostrate before you.’ A faint smile ghosted across his cracked lips. That was the man she had loved.

‘But not for me,’ she said. ‘For yourself. I cannot heal you, Paris. And you must leave the mountain, or you will pollute it with your death.’

She turned and walked away. And much later, as she went to welcome her boy back from the pastures, she saw there was now no trace of Paris, not even a drop of blood on the pine needles. And though she was sure that this time the conversation had been real, she nonetheless found herself thinking it must have been another of her dreams.





21


Calliope


You know, I like her. Oenone, I mean. I know the poet grows weary of these women who appear and disappear from his story, but even he is starting to grasp that the whole war can be explained this way. And would he really have overlooked Laodamia, as so many poets have before him? A woman who lost so much so young deserves something, even if it’s just to have her story told. Doesn’t she?

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.