Paris took a half step toward Helen then, as if to slap her, but her proximity to the tall Hector held him back. We foot soldiers near the wall stared at nothing and pretended we had no ears.
Helen looked at Paris. Her eyes were red and brimming. She still spoke to Hector as if Paris—her kidnapper and putative second husband—was not in the room. “This . . . one . . . has earned the scalding scorn of real men. He has no steadiness of spirit, no grit. Not now, not . . . ever.”
Paris blinked and a flush rose into his cheeks as if he had been slapped.
“But he’ll reap the fruits of his cowardice, Hector,” continued Helen, literally spitting out the words now, her saliva striking the marble floor. “I swear to you that he will reap the fruits of his weakness. By the gods, I swear this.”
Paris stalked out of the room.
Helen turned to the standing, grime-streaked warrior. “But come to the couch and rest next to me, dear brother. You are the one hit hardest by all this fighting—and all for me, Hector, whore that I am.” She sat on the cushioned couch and patted a place next to her. “The two of us are bound together in this fate, Hector. Zeus planted the seed of a million deaths, of the doom of our age, in each of our breasts. My dear Hector. We are mortals. We will both die. But you and I will live for a thousand generations in song . . .”
As if unwilling to hear more, Hector turned on his heel and left the room, donning his tall helmet so that it flashed in the low-slanting rays of the evening sun.
Looking one last time at Helen as she sat, head bowed, on the cushioned bench, noting her perfect pale arms and the softness of her breasts visible in her thin gown, I lifted my spear—the scout Dolon’s spear—and followed Hector and his other three loyal spearmen.
This is important that I tell it like this. Helen stirs, whispers my name, but goes back to sleep. My name. She whispers, “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” and it as if I have been speared through the heart.
And now, lying next to the most beautiful woman in the ancient world, perhaps the most beautiful woman in history—or at least the one woman who has caused the greatest number of men to die in her name—I remember more about my life. About my former life. About my real life.
I was married. My wife’s name was Susan. We met as undergraduates at Boston College, married shortly after graduation. Susan was a high school counselor but rarely worked after we moved to Indiana where I began teaching classics at Indiana University in 1972. We had no children, but not for want of trying. Susan was alive when I grew ill from liver cancer and went into the hospital.
Why in God’s name am I remembering this now? After nine years of almost no personal memories, why remember Susan now? Why be slashed and cursed by the jagged shards of my former life now?
I don’t believe in God with a capital G and, despite their obvious solidity, I don’t believe in the gods with their small g’s. Not as real forces in the universe. But I believe in the bitch-goddess Irony. She crosses all time. She rules men and gods and God alike.
And She has a wicked sense of humor.
Like Romeo lying next to Juliet, I hear the thunder move toward us from the southwest, the sound echoing in the courtyard, the leading wind stirring the curtains on the terraces on both sides of the large bedroom. Helen stirs but does not wake. Not yet.
I close my eyes and pretend to sleep a few more minutes. My eyes feel gritty, as if I have sand under my eyelids. I’m getting too old to stay awake so long, especially after making love three times to the most beautiful and sensual woman in the world.
After leaving Helen and Paris, we followed Hector to his home. The hero who had almost never run from a fight in his life was running from the temptation Helen had offered—running home to his wife Andromache and their one-year-old son.
In all my nine years of observing and hanging around Ilium, I had never spoken to Hector’s wife, but I knew her story. Everyone in Ilium knew her story.
Andromache was beautiful in her own right—no comparison to Helen or the goddesses, it was true, but beautiful in her own more human way—and she was royalty as well. She came from the Trojan area known as Cilicia in Thebes, and her father was the local king, Eetion, admired by most, respected by all. Their small palace was on the lower slopes of Mount Placos in a forest famous for its timber; the great Scaean Gates of Ilium were built from Cilician timber, as were the siege-engine towers sitting on their wheels behind Greek lines less than two miles away.
Achilles had killed her father, cutting Eetion down in combat when the swift-footed Achaean man-killer had led his men against the outlying Trojan cities shortly after the Greeks had landed. Andromache had seven brothers—none of them fighters, but sheepherders and tenders of oxen—and Achilles had killed them on that same day, finding them in the fields and chasing them down to their death in the rocky hills below the forest. Achilles’ plan was obviously to leave no male vestige of the Cilician royal family alive. That night, Achilles had his men dress Eetion’s body in war-bronze and he burned the corpse with respect, heaping a grave-mound above the old king’s ashes. But Andromache’s brothers’ bodies lay untended in the fields and woods, food for wolves.
Rich with the plunder of a dozen cities, Achilles still demanded a literal king’s ransom for Eetion’s queen—Andromache’s mother—and he had received it. Ilium was still rich then, and free to bargain with its invaders.
Andromache’s mother had returned home to the halls of their empty palace in Cilicia and there—according to Andromache’s frequent telling of her woeful tale—“Artemis, in a shower of arrows, shot her down.”
Well, in a way.
Artemis, daughter of Zeus and Leto and sister of Apollo, is the goddess of the hunt—I saw her on Olympos only yesterday—but she is also the goddess presiding over childbirth. At one point in the Iliad, an infuriated Apollo flung shouts at his sister, in front of their father Zeus—“He lets you kill off mothers in their labor”—meaning that Artemis is responsible for dispensing death in childbirth as well as for serving as the divine midwife to mortal women.
Andromache’s mother died nine months after being taken hostage by Achilles on the day Eetion, Andromache’s father, was killed. Andromache’s mother died in childbirth, attempting to bring her husband’s killer’s child into the world.
Tell me that the bitch-goddess Irony doesn’t rule the world.
Andromache and their baby were not at home. Hector rushed from room to room in the house, the four of us spearmen holding back, watching the entrance but not interfering. The hero was obviously worried and showed more visible anxiety that I had ever seen him show on the battlefield. Back at the doorway, he stopped two servant women coming in.
“Where’s Andromache? Has she gone to the Temple of Athena with the other noble wives? To my sister’s house? To see my brother’s wives?”
“Our mistress has gone to the wall, master,” said the oldest of the servants. “All of the Trojan women have heard of the day’s terrible fighting, of Diomedes’ wrath and the turn of fortune against the sons of Ilium. You wife has gone to the huge gate-tower of Troy to see what she can see, to learn if her master and husband still lives. She ran like a madwoman, Master, with the nurse running along behind, carrying your child.”
We could hardly keep up with Hector as he ran to the Scaean Gates, and I realized a block from the wall that I shouldn’t stay with him. This event—the meeting of Hector and Andromache on the ramparts—was too important. Too many gods would be viewing it. The Muse might well be there, hunting for me.
Several hundred yards from the Gates, I dropped away from the loping spearmen and fell into a crowd on a side street. The shadows were deep now, the air cooling, but the topless towers of Ilium were still lighted by the red sun setting in the west.