A Thousand Ships(82)

Andromache felt her mind begin to travel down the road she could not allow it to take. She focused on the spoon in front of her mouth, and tried to keep it level, so the soup did not spill on her filthy dress. The sailor nodded slowly in encouragement, as though she were an invalid. He waited for her to finish eating and quietly took the bowl away.

But eating alone did not bring her back to life. Her eyes could not focus on anything but the horizon, she did not hear anyone speak unless he screamed in her ear, and she could not bear any touch or taste. The material world repelled her because (she was sure) she should not be in it any longer. The Fates had made a mistake when they let her be taken aboard Neoptolemus’ ship. She should have died on the shores of Troy, instead of her son.

She wove the cloak poorly, although she had once been a fine craftswoman. The last cloak she had woven had been for Hector – dark and bright for him to wear into battle – and it had been exquisite. It was slashed in two by Achilles when he drove his fierce blade into her husband’s body, and then she had watched it stretch out on the ground behind him like a pool of blood as Achilles dragged his corpse three times around the walls of the city.

In Epirus, she was careless with cleaning the wool, so the finished fabric scratched her skin. She did not spin a fine thread, so the cloak was covered in lumps where the wool was too bulky to sit flat. And she did not keep the threads taut, so the garment had an ugly puckered edge. But sometime during the process of weaving it, she found herself wanting to finish it so she would not be cold. And although she did not understand it immediately, this was the first sign of her life after death.

But when Andromache had finished the cloak and wrapped it around herself, she still felt cold. She remembered one day near the beginning of the war, when a young Trojan fighter had been carried back to the city by his comrades. He had been shot in the back – a lucky hit from a distant archer – and his suffering was terrible to behold. It was not the pain which was distressing: he was in less pain than virtually any other Trojan or Greek she saw injured. It was the gap between what had happened to him and what he could perceive. He lay on his side unable to feel the arrow, or his spine, or his legs or feet. All sensation had deserted him below the chest. When asked by the healers to describe his symptoms, he said simply that his body felt cold. This was his only complaint for the next three days, at the end of which he died. And that had been what filled Andromache’s mind as she submitted to Neoptolemus.

She was not quite sure how long she had been living in Epirus before she realized she was pregnant. She said nothing to Neoptolemus for a while, because she could not find the words. She felt too many things at once and it took her many careful hours at the loom (now weaving finer garments once more, though nothing in comparison to what she had made for Hector) before she could isolate some of them and give them names. She felt fear, firstly. Neoptolemus rarely spoke to her other than to bark orders. She had no idea if he wanted his slave to bear him a child. He had no son, as far as she knew, and he had not yet a wife. What if she told him, or he noticed her body changing shape, and he punished her? Would he kick her in the stomach until the baby was dead? Andromache felt a wave of sickness that did not come from her child. Or rather, it came from her first child, from Astyanax. It had been Neoptolemus who killed her boy, hurling him from the walls of Troy before snarling back to his ship to bring her here to Epirus. How could she trust that a man who would murder her first child would not murder her second? She could not.

She moved her shuttle up and down through the warp-threads, pulling the weft gently so she did not stretch the edges, pushing each completed row up so she did not leave any gaps. The steadiness of the work, the feel of the threads beneath her fingers, the enforced calm of feeding the shuttle through: these things made her able to keep breathing, and naming. So fear, that was the first feeling: both for the baby and for herself. Then came revulsion. Her blood would be mixed with the blood of the man who had killed her son. And Neoptolemus was son of Achilles, who had killed her husband. To be enslaved by this vicious clan of murderers was terrible enough, but to produce a new scion was worse. She felt tainted by the infant inside her and had no confidence that the feeling would pass when the child was born. Anger, that was the third. For everything she had once told Hector had now come to pass: don’t keep going out to fight on your own, she had said. Don’t take so many risks. Fight among the Trojans, not ahead of them. Your honour is already assured. Catch the eye of Achilles and he will cut you down and then what will become of your wife and son? We will be enslaved with no one to care for us.

There was no pleasure in being proved right, of course, only a slowly unfolding dread. Why had Hector not listened to his wife’s wise words? How could he have abandoned her, abandoned their son? Everything had come to pass as she had predicted, but worse. And if only . . . She broke her thoughts. She could not begin to consider if only, or the sun and the moon would come crashing down upon her.

So fear, revulsion, anger. Guilt, that was next. She felt a terrible pressing burden of guilt. Because in spite of all this, she felt a small flame of inexpressible joy. Her body, so long not her own, was providing her with comfort at last. She had nothing to love but her memories and those were too painful to think about. And now she had something. And in spite of the fear, the revulsion, the anger and the guilt, the flame kept burning inside her.

*

Andromache never came to love Neoptolemus, because that was asking too much even of a woman like her. His actions could not be forgotten, nor did he ever show the slightest contrition for the terrible toll he had exacted upon her and the women she had once called her family. But nor could she maintain the visceral loathing she had felt when he first took her from her home. It was not possible to keep hating a man with whom she lived in such close proximity: the aversion had to die, or she would die. And although his temper was fierce, and she sometimes found herself shrinking back from his anger, he was not as cruel as she had feared he would be. When he saw his son for the first time, she could not breathe. The wet-nurse held the child for him and she saw a soft smile transform his petulant face. He was not a good man, but Andromache suddenly saw that he might nonetheless be a good father. He named their son Molossus.