A Thousand Ships(59)

Hecabe said nothing.

‘I’ll take the other one, then,’ he said. ‘Come.’ He jerked his hand and the men stepped forward, ready to take Polyxena.

‘If she is not for you, then why have you come to collect her?’ Hecabe asked. She would not demean herself by begging to be allowed a few more moments with her beloved girl. But she could not bear to see her go.

Menelaus shook his head. ‘Drew the short straw,’ he said. ‘Come on, girl.’

Polyxena kissed her mother, and Andromache, and tried to embrace Cassandra. But her sister clutched at her arms and began to scream. The soldiers wrenched her free so they could march her away as their captive.





31


Polyxena


When she had murmured her prayers growing up, Polyxena had never wished for bravery. There would have been no point. Her city was under siege; she had only hazy childhood memories of it being any other way. So courage was not something special, to be wished for; it was something commonplace, required of everyone. She had always known fear for those she loved: her brothers as they strode out of the city gates in the mornings, her sisters, when the city’s food supplies ran short. Her mother, as her shoulders began to hunch, like a crone. Her father, as he stood on the high walls, watching his sons fight off the men determined to take his city by force. Each dead man was a source of personal grief and civic fear: a husband, a son, a father lost and one fewer defender left to fight the next day.

But feeling fear was not the same as lacking courage. Anyone could be brave if he felt no fear. The Trojans murmured that this was true of Achilles, this was why he was so lethal. He rode into battle on his chariot, with no care whether he lived or died. None at all. He cared only for the safety of his friend, for Patroclus. If the Trojans kept clear of him, Achilles would scythe through their ranks seemingly at random. It was many months, perhaps years, before the Trojans realized the better way to fight was to send a small group of men after Patroclus, which would draw Achilles to his side. The men died, of course, every time. They drew lots to decide who would take on this unwinnable fight to protect their comrades.

Polyxena had seen these men, as they bade their wives farewell, and cherished their last few moments with their sons. They had an air of calm about them, as everyone around them rushed to fasten their armour and make their weapons ready. They knew they would die and so the time for fear was past. All that was left was the chance to die courageously, to remove Achilles from the battlefield for long enough to allow their fellow warriors the opportunity to push forward elsewhere, to drive the Greeks back towards their ships. At the time, Polyxena had thought these men to be out of their minds with grief or sorrow. How else were they so unconcerned about dying? Now, she wished she had their certainty. She would have given a great deal to know the fate she was being taken to meet.

The Greeks spoke quickly in their own tongue and she did not understand the thick accent or the dialect. They were not as lascivious as she had been led to believe. One of them grabbed at her, under the guise of helping to steady her on the uneven ground. But Menelaus shouted something and the man removed his hands, his face reminiscent of a dog caught stealing milk from a jug.

Above all, she hoped that Menelaus had not lied to her mother and that he wasn’t taking her for himself. No fate could be worse than being enslaved by him, leaving her homeland to become the handmaiden of Helen, the cause of all their grief. Well, perhaps not the whole cause. Polyxena knew her mother had always let Paris off too lightly. Her brother Hector had made no such mistake. He had been quick to censure Paris, and Polyxena had known he was right. But still, she did not wish it to be Helen who ordered her to fetch water or grind meal. Even if they made her a maidservant, she was sickened by the thought of plaiting the hair of her former sister-in-law, or helping her to dress each morning, or looking the other way when her secret lovers arrived (Polyxena had no doubt that Helen’s character would be unchanged when she returned to Sparta).

She felt a sudden rush of anger flow through her, at Paris, at Priam, at Hector, at all of them. At all the men who should have protected her and who had instead left her. And her anger was tinged with the jealousy that they had died and she would be enslaved. Men would have vied with one another to win her in marriage, and now she would be impregnated by her owner, or another slave, and there would be nothing she could do to prevent it. Her offspring should have been royalty but would now be the lowest of the low: born into servitude. The shame of all this was hers alone to bear.

She knew that her mother, her sister, Andromache and the other Trojan women would share her fate, but none of them would be present to console her and nor would she be able to offer them words of comfort. The cruelty of it was typical of the Greeks. If the war had been reversed, and the Trojans had sailed across the ocean to besiege a Hellene city, her relatives would have behaved to the Greeks much as the Greeks had behaved in Troy. They, too, would have killed the men and enslaved the women and children. That was what it meant to win a war, after all. But, although those women and children would have suffered the loss of their freedom, they would have remained together. A consolation for one another. Whereas the Greeks stemmed from so many different cities and islands that they were separating every Trojan woman from the tatters of her surviving family. She called down a quiet curse and turned to Menelaus who trudged along in silence, dragging one leg a little in the shifting sand.