A Thousand Ships(84)

But the death of Astyanax had changed her and she had known she would never love anyone in the same way thereafter. When her child lay smashed beneath the city walls, she knew that something inside her was broken and could not be repaired. Like any mother, she had found that her love for Astyanax was bound up in fear. When he was born, she worried with every fever: even a slight illness had her scurrying to the altars to placate the gods and beg their assistance. She cared equally for Molossus: she would have sworn it before the statue of Zeus with no fear of retribution. But she did not spend her days or nights worrying that her Greek-born son would fall ill or injure himself. She had nothing left to give to the quotidian business of motherhood. She could only trust that the gods would protect him (as they had not protected Astyanax) because she now knew that if the worst should happen, there was nothing she could do to save him. She had failed her first son, and she had no more resources now than she had had then. Instead, she had an intimate knowledge of the depths of her powerlessness: there was no possibility of self-deception. She had loved Astyanax as though she could swaddle him in blankets and keep him safe from the world. She loved Molossus as though they both lived on a cliff edge from which either or both of them might fall at any moment.

So when the message came to her from a slave, that Neoptolemus was dead and Orestes sought to make Hermione his wife, she felt the customary shudder of alarm, but it did not occur to her to flee. Where could she go, friendless as they were in Greece? And who would give her shelter from Orestes? Neoptolemus’ grandfather might be of some assistance, she supposed, since he had lost his son Achilles and now his grandson, too. Molossus was all that remained of the noble house of Peleus. Andromache found herself sending the slave on to Peleus, in the hope that he could do what she could not and protect her boy. But she did it with little expectation, and was astonished when the old man appeared, brandishing his walking-stick like a cudgel and demanding that she and Molossus accompany him home.

*

As Neoptolemus had once promised, she married Helenus. The Trojan prince had a knack for making friends rather than enemies, and they were soon able to found a small settlement of their own. At Andromache’s request, they began to build a city which resembled their lost home: a new Troy, less grand and imposing, but with a high citadel nestling beneath a mountain. Sometimes, when the mist took a while to clear in the mornings, she could imagine herself home again. Helenus bore a slight resemblance to his long-dead brother, Hector. Sometimes she found herself looking at his profile and seeing the features of her first husband leap from the face of her second. She never knew if Molossus resembled Astyanax as he grew up. But as she grew older, she found the two boys merging in her mind and when she saw the silhouette of Molossus returning from a day’s hunting in the forest, she also saw Astyanax treading in his footsteps. Her later life was lived amid a set of shadows and reflections of all that she had lost in the catastrophes of her early life. And if the shadow of happiness fell short of happiness itself, it was more than she had ever expected to find when she lay prostrate on the shores of Troy, weeping for her beloved child.





43


Calliope


Sing, Muse, he said, and I have sung.

I have sung of armies and I have sung of men.

I have sung of gods and monsters, I have sung of stories and lies.

I have sung of death and of life, of joy and of pain.

I have sung of life after death.

And I have sung of the women, the women in the shadows. I have sung of the forgotten, the ignored, the untold. I have picked up the old stories and I have shaken them until the hidden women appear in plain sight. I have celebrated them in song because they have waited long enough. Just as I promised him: this was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of all of them. A war does not ignore half the people whose lives it touches. So why do we?

They have waited to have their story told, and I will make them wait no longer. If the poet refuses the song I have offered him, I will take it away and leave him silent. He has sung before: he may not want it and does not need it. But the story will be told. Their story will be told, no matter how long it takes. I am ageless, undying: time does not matter to me. All that matters is the telling.

Sing, Muse, he said.

Well, do you hear me? I have sung.





Afterword


The inspiration for this novel comes from across the ancient world, in both time and place. Some of it was literary, some was archaeological. Some chapters are entirely my own invention, and some borrow from source material which you might already know. The texts which I returned to throughout this book were Euripides’ Trojan Women (also his Hecabe) for the Trojan Women chapters; and Homer’s Odyssey, for the Penelope chapters. In addition, I turned to Virgil’s Aeneid for Creusa’s chapter (though it gave me a lot more on the burning city and the sibilant Sinon than it did on Creusa. Which isn’t to say that Virgil doesn’t write amazing women: I couldn’t fit Dido into this novel, which was a real blow. But when something doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit); Ovid’s remarkable Heroides gave me the first insight into Laodamia, and also persuaded me that I could write Penelope’s story as letters to her absent husband; Clytemnestra’s chapter owes everything to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, of course. There’s not much about Briseis in Homer’s Iliad, but the plague incurred by Agamemnon’s refusal to return Chryseis is taken from there (the plague symptoms themselves are borrowed from a later author, Thucydides, who contracted plague at the start of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BCE, but recovered to tell the tale); Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia Among the Taurians informed her chapter; Andromache takes her later story from Euripides’ play of the same name.