A Thousand Ships

The idea was laughable. Countless ships, as many as a thousand, sailing across the oceans to besiege one city for the sake of a woman? Even when Creusa saw her—saw Helen with her long golden hair arranged over her red dress, matched by the gold embroidery which decorated every hem and the ropes of gold she wore around her neck and her wrists—even then she did not believe an army would have sailed all this way to take her home.

I’m giving him the chance to see the war from both ends: how it was caused, and how its consequences played out. Epic in scale and subject matter. And here he is, whining about Theano because her part in the story is completed and he’s only just worked out how to describe her. Idiot poet. It’s not her story, or Creusa’s story. It’s their story.

[Hecabe] was not so foolish as to believe that she herself would have the chance to punish all the traitors and murderers and wrongdoers who had contributed to the downfall of her city. But she would have the gods remember who they were.

[…]

She would have been startled to discover that her daughter-in-law was doing precisely the opposite thing in her mind. Creusa, Theano, Crino: three Trojan women at least who were free, either in death or in life. Andromache marked each one with a silent joy. Everywhere she looked she could see only women in her own condition: fallen into slavery, the property of soldiers and thugs. But there were three who belonged to no one.

Patroclus laughed. “They will call [Achilles] the greatest hero who ever lived,” he replied. “What are the lives of your kin, against the hundreds he has killed already?”

“Is that the only measure of greatness? Killing so many that you have lost count? Making no distinction between warriors and unarmed men and women?”

“You argue well for a woman,” Patroclus said. “Your husband must have been a patient man.”

“Don’t speak of my husband,” she said. “Or I will not speak to you at all.”

“Your conniving ways have already cost me my daughter, my oldest child.” His voice cracked, and suddenly Chryseis understood why Briseis had advised her to mention his daughter when he seemed likely to harm her, all those nights ago. The man had lost his own child, and he could not stand to think of it. “And now you would take away my prize. Mine, out of all the leaders of the Greeks. Get out of my sight, or I will kill you myself.”

Men’s deaths are epic, women’s deaths are tragic: is that it? He has misunderstood the very nature of conflict. Epic is countless tragedies, woven together. Heroes don’t become heroes without carnage, and carnage has both causes and consequences.

[…]

But it hurts, he said when Creusa died. He would rather her story had been snuffed out like a spark failing to catch damp kindling. It does hurt, I whispered. It should hurt. She isn’t a footnote, she’s a person. And she—all the Trojan women—should be memorialized as much as any other person.

“Do you think that’s true?” Polyxena asked her mother. “Achilles was destined to be a killer?”

Hecabe shrugged her shoulders, but the cool breeze coming off the sea turned it into a shudder. Polyxena unwound her stole—once a fine wool, dyed a bright saffron yellow before it was smeared with grey streaks—and stood up to wrap it around her mother.

[…]

“If you think of him like that,” Polyxena said, “it means he had no choice in what he did. So how can we hate him, if he was just acting as the Fates demanded? If he had no more say in his life than you or I?”

For a terrible moment, she thought she must have done something wrong: worn an ugly dress or applied her make-up inappropriately. But her mother’s slaves had been unanimous in their praise of her. She was correctly attired for a wedding.

And then she saw the glint of her father’s knife in the morning sun and she understood everything in a rush, as though a god had put the words into her mind. The treacherous stillness in the air was divinely sent. Artemis had been affronted by something her father had done, and now she demanded a sacrifice or the ships would not sail. So there would be no marriage, no husband for Iphigenia. Not today and not ever.

“All [Menelaus] has ever wanted is to have Helen as his wife. He had her, he lost her, and now he has her again. My presence is scarcely required at all, so long as it cannot be said that I am with someone else.”

“But you could have refused Paris,” Hecabe said. “To abandon your husband, your daughter…”

Helen shrugged. “Which of us can refuse Aphrodite?” she asked. “A god’s power is far greater than mine. When she urged me to accompany him to Troy, I tried to resist. But she gave me no choice. She told me what I must do and then she withdrew, and in her absence, I heard a high-pitched noise, a distant scream. […] That is what it means to refuse a god, it is to be driven mad.”

“You know the apple is mine,” she said. “Give it to me and I will give you the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“You?” he asked, his voice cracking on the word.

“Not me,” she replied. “I would destroy you, Paris. You are mortal.” Paris wondered if destruction would be such a terrible way to die. “I will give you the closest thing to me. Her name is Helen of Sparta.”

If he complains to me again, I will ask him this: is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. […] Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition.

[Helen] took slow, sinuous steps toward the Spartan guards who owed their lives and their allegiance to Menelaus, who had fought to the death for her, and who despised her even as they could not take their eyes from her. […] She simply stared into [Odysseus’s] grey-green eyes as he flushed a deep, dark red. “You would give your life for me in a heartbeat,” she said. “You cannot disguise it any more than other men can. So don’t mock me, Odysseus. Or I may decide that you will regret it.”

But when the bard sang this next part, it was all I could do not to have him thrown over Ithaca’s rocky outcrops and left to drown in the darkening sea. First you asked your mother how she had died. Then you asked after the health of your father. Then your son. Then your honour. Then your throne. And then, when you had asked about everything else except the dog, you remembered to ask after your wife.

She helped him place his right arm into the right sleeve and quickly pushed his left arm into the left one before he realized that the robe was no robe, but a net, a trap, an ambush. The sleeves had no ends, they were sewn shut and attached to the body of the garment, so once his arms were inside them he was pinned. He clutched at the fabric with his fingers but she had sewn layer after layer into the sleeve ends, so there was nothing he could grip. She spun him off balance, and tied the strings at the back of the robe into a quick knot.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. Angry now, not afraid. Not afraid until he saw the sword glinting in her left hand. […] He did not recognize it: it was a short womanish weapon. Where could his wife have found such a thing?

I used to wonder what had happened to [the suitors], and why they were so anxious to stay somewhere they were not wanted. Pausing their lives, refusing to marry girls who would have them, failing to start families. Instead they preferred to be together as men, under the guise of wooing me. It took me some time to realize that this was in fact their war. Too young to sail to Troy, they were children when their brothers and cousins and fathers joined the greatest expedition that Hellas had ever seen. They had missed their chance to be warriors in the great war. And so they waged war upon my storerooms, and upon my virtue, because they had nothing else to fight for.

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 […]

But sometime during the process of weaving [the cloak], 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.

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?