A Thousand Ships(81)

Your devoted Penelope





41


The Moirai


It was the same scene every day: Clotho held the spindle, Lachesis watched her with hungry appraisal in her eyes, and Atropos sat in the darkest corner, her stubby blade almost invisible in the gloom. Clotho fed the thread through her right hand and flicked the spindle with her left. She could not remember doing anything else for as long as she had ever known. She would take a clump of fleece in one hand and twist it into a thick rough string. Once, she might have plucked thorns or burrs from the soft fuzz, but she had long since given that up; they only scratched her hands. The thread was so fragile at this point, almost still fleece, scarcely thread at all. The fibres would pull apart with the slightest pressure, so she had to be careful. Lachesis would not forgive her if she shortened the lifespan of a single mortal through her clumsiness. It was her task to spin the thread of life but it was for Lachesis to decide how long the thread would be. Clotho had once suggested that they swap jobs for a while, so she could rest her cramping fingers. But neither of the others would consider it, which just proved what she had always known: that she had the hardest task of the three of them and it would never change. No wonder she felt so little sympathy for the mortal lives which flitted between her fingers.

The grease in the fibres kept her fingertips soft as she rubbed them across the puffy strand. Once it became a little firmer, she would hook it around the spindle and the weight pulled it longer and thinner still. Only then would Lachesis focus her attention on the thread. She used no measuring stick, only her sharp eyes. At the crucial moment, she would nod and Atropos would slash her short blade into the space between Clotho’s hands. Another life measured and complete. Sometimes they misjudged: Lachesis did not always nod with the vigour required, and in the gloomy light, Atropos missed it. Who had that man been, Clotho tried to remember, who had lived so long after the Fates botched his mortal span? She could not recall his name, only that he had been so ancient when he died that he had looked like a pile of autumn leaves. Occasionally Atropos sliced too low or too high and cut the thread at the wrong point. And sometimes Clotho could not get the thread to form properly: her hands were dry, the fleece was not greasy enough, and the fibres simply fell apart before Lachesis could find anything to measure. She felt no sorrow for these souls, because if she thought at all about the consequences of her actions, she would become paralysed and never spin again. But she did prefer it if one of the others made a mistake, because that led – as often as not – to a longer life rather than a shorter one. When the thread would not form, it could only mean a grieving mother, standing over a cradle, howling at the unhearing sky.





42


Andromache


When Andromache looked up at the mountains that towered above Epirus, she wished they reminded her of Mount Ida, but they did not. Mount Ida rose to a perfect point, so high that often in the mornings it was shrouded in mist and she and Hector had been unable to see the top of it. She had watched the sun chase the mists away and each time the highest point was visible again, she felt calmness flood through her, like a child who can finally make out her father coming home in the distance. She missed the mountain, but when she thought of that instead of everything else she had lost, she found she could keep herself from weeping.

But Epirus was no Troy. The peaks lacked the kindly parental nature of Ida. Here, there were mountains on all sides, so that Andromache felt as though she were trapped at the bottom of a well. She had been taken from her beautiful city, with its thick walls and high citadel, for what was scarcely more than a village. Well, a collection of villages. Epirus nestled in the northernmost part of Greece, so its mountains were always covered in snow and Andromache was often cold. She had never worn a woollen tunic in Troy, or in Thebe where she had grown up. But in Epirus it was a necessity.

When they landed here – she blurred the details of that period of her life as much as she could, but this part she did remember – she had woven a cloak for herself in a matter of days. She had little choice if she was not to die from the vicious north wind that whistled down from the mountains. Neoptolemus had ordered her to spin the wool (a gift from his none-too-loyal subjects) and weave. And she had obeyed him. But although she began the task resentfully (a princess of Troy reduced to slavery) she had completed it eagerly, keen to have the thick fabric to wrap around herself in the cold evenings. It had been the realization of this – her desire not to be cold – that made her accept she might not wish to die after all.

She had spent the voyage from Troy like a dead woman. She could not rise from her pallet, she could not eat, she could barely drink wine unless it was diluted almost down to water. She watched with mild interest as the bones in her wrist grew more pronounced, and once or twice she traced her fingers along her clavicle and felt the hollows on each side of her neck growing deeper. Only on the fifth day, when he shouted, screamed really, a hand’s breadth away from her face – his stale-wine breath making her queasy in a way the choppy sea never had – demanding that she ate and stop damaging his property, did she manage to swallow a small quantity of thin soup. The sailor who brought it to her looked sorry for her, when he watched her retching as she raised the too-large spoon to her lips. But he was afraid of Neoptolemus, too. Rumour had it that he had hurled one of his own men over the side of the ship on the voyage to Troy, because of some slight misdemeanour. The sailors would not run the risk of being set adrift, of watching their comrades sail off into the distance while they tried desperately to keep afloat for just a moment longer. Neoptolemus was not known to have expressed regret for any cruelty he had perpetuated against anyone – man, woman or child.