For the Most Beautiful (2 page)

The apparition vanishes as quickly as it came.

He blinks, turns to the ox-eyed beauty with the oak wreath. ‘Choose me,' Era breathes, ‘and you will become king of the world. You will have power beyond your wildest dreams. You will sit on thrones and carry jewel-clustered sceptres. The sky itself will bow down to touch the earth at your command. Who needs to win a war, when you can force the peoples of the earth to do your bidding?'

His vision changes. Now he sees gold-clad kings kneeling at his feet, a jewelled sceptre in his hand and a crown upon his head. He watches as the kings raise their sceptres to him as their ruler, and hundreds upon thousands of warriors and slaves bow to him, acknowledging his power …

He cannot see Arinniti through the vision spread before him, but he knows she is speaking from the sound of her voice – something like the froth of ocean foam caressing the shore.

‘I offer beauty,' she says, and, for a third time, the golden image shifts. He is looking now into the eyes of a woman – a woman so beautiful that he feels as if the breath has been drawn from his body at the very sight of her. Her hair is soft, like fine-spun silk, her eyes deep as liquid honey, her skin the colour of virgin oil, her breasts round and firm as pale-skinned apples, just visible through the long gold-spun veil she wears draped sheer over her naked skin. He hears a soft groan of desire, and knows it has come from his own lips.

Arinniti laughs – sensual, confident. ‘My gift,' she says, ‘is nothing less than the most beautiful woman in the world.'

He reaches his fingers forwards, trembling, the tips brushing the woman's veil, but as he does so, the vision disappears.

He hesitates, gazing at the goddesses, the image of the woman filling his mind.

He cannot know that a war hangs upon his choice, the tale of which will be told for a thousand years and more. He cannot know that heroes whose names will echo through the ages will fight and live and love and die because of the words he will say now. All he knows is that Arinniti is looking at him, and as he gazes back into her face, her eyes are blue, like the clear shallows of the sea, and her breath is like roses in summer upon his face.

‘Arinniti,' he breathes.

Her lips curl into a smile.

‘Helen is yours,' she says, and her fingers close around the apple he is holding out to her.

There is a scream of rage from Atana and Era. A pillar of flame rises up around the three goddesses, casting their skin into shadows and turning their eyes a burning orange, their hair flying around their faces in the fire. The air around him grows hot, unbearably hot, as if it would melt, and the goddesses' forms shimmer before him, dissolving into the yawning chasm of chaos. He falls to the ground, his eyes aching, his palms covered with sweat. A sharp breeze whips across his forehead.

He looks up.

The goddesses are gone. All is peaceful once more. The sound of goat bells echoes across the mountainside, interspersed with the occasional rustle of leaves as a lizard skitters across the rocks, and the cries of the eagles circling overhead. The city of Troy is just visible on the horizon, its sturdy walls and upper city rising above the mud-brick houses of the town, and, beyond it, the plain, the meandering rivers lined by tamarisk trees, and the shimmering sea.

He stands up, shaking.

He is hardly sure that it happened. A mirage of the summer heat, he thinks. He wipes his sweating forehead with his arm.
But if it did … If it is true …

His thoughts move back to the golden woman, the vision still shimmering before his senses.
Helen
… The name whispers in his mind, like a faint breath of wind in summer.

He smiles in spite of himself.

Helen … The most beautiful woman in the world.

Hermes, god of trickery and thieving, turns away from where he has been watching, hidden from Paris and the goddesses behind the thick trunk of the olive tree. He shakes his head. What a fool Paris was not to run away as soon as he heard what the goddesses wanted him to do. And Helen will create a problem, he thinks. She already has a kingdom in Greece over which to rule, and a husband, wedded and bedded – did the goddesses not think of that? If Paris is to receive his prize, it will mean war: a war that will rage across the world from the walled cities of the Greeks to the gold-filled treasuries of Troy …

Hermes pauses. A slow grin spreads across his face.

Of course the goddesses had thought of everything. Of course they had known what would happen.

That must have been why they had wanted to come.

He begins to pace up and down, his thoughts whirling as he puts the pieces together. They must have known that Paris would choose Helen. They must have realized that Paris would choose to seize her from her husband, Menelaus, and that Menelaus, in turn, would summon the Greek armies to avenge his loss in the greatest battle the world has ever seen. Why else would they have bothered with a paltry piece of golden fruit? Why else would Zeus have told him to bring them here, to Paris, an idiot if ever there was one? What god ever cared about an apple compared to the chance to start a war?

He cocks his head, his excitement rising, like the foaming crest of a wave before the shore. He can almost hear the sharpening of the weapons – the delightful scraping of bronze on stone that means the mortals are at it again. Definitely time for a war, he thinks. It's getting far too pastoral around here. A little blood to stain the plain, a few heroes fighting and dying, a couple of cities burnt, the columns of soot and ash curling up to heaven, like the smoke of a sacrifice …

He glances at Paris, who is sitting on the mountain slope, his head in his hands and his mind full of Helen. Hermes grins. Helen will not cause the war, he thinks. It will be the gods, as it always is, who do that. It will be the pride of the lords of Greece when they fight over a beautiful woman. It will be the greed of a prince who steals her to have her beauty for his own.

But Helen won't be the only beautiful woman in this war.

Hermes turns to gaze out over the green and black Trojan plain, the battlement-crowned towns of Lyrnessus, Pedasus and Larisa dotting the pale blue line of the coast all the way to Troy.

The contest for the most beautiful has only just begun.

‘Three – four – five …'

We scattered. Like a flock of pure white birds frightened by a barking dog, we skittered away from Troilus, flapping, chattering, fluttering with the thrill of the chase.

‘Twenty-seven – twenty-eight – twenty-nine …'

Feet clattering against the cobblestones, hearts pounding against our ribs.

‘Fifty-two – fifty-three – fifty-four …'

Down a flight of stairs. Past a garden surrounded by a high wall, the ripe fig trees bursting with fruit, a grape vine climbing the wall. Pluck a grape, feel the juice on your chin, run on. Round a corner, across a courtyard. Avoid the old man selling fish and the group of women carrying water on their heads in large clay pots.

‘Cassandra – come on …' I laughed and took her hand – after all, she was not as fast a runner as I, and she did not know where I wanted to hide. I felt her fingers close around mine, and we kept running, whispering and breathless, as excited as if we were children once more and not almost women grown.

‘Krisayis …' Cassandra panted. ‘Krisayis, where are we going?'

I took a turn to the right into a long, narrow street, its name scratched into the cornerstone of one of the houses. A large stone slab was planted in the paving-stones beneath, roughly hewn from Mount Ida where the gods lived, its very crevices numinous with the presence of the divine. These slabs were scattered throughout the city, one for every sanctuary, and several for the gates in the walls and King Priam's palaces: markers, if you knew where they led, as well as guardians – the eyes of the gods upon our city.

Cassandra's eyebrows creased in sudden recognition. ‘We're going to the temple of Apulunas!' she exclaimed. ‘But you
know
your father forbade you to set foot in the precinct until—'

‘Hush,' I said, my voice thrilling with excitement. ‘We're almost there. It must be near here … somewhere here …'

I skirted around the edge of a small shrine with a bronze brazier set before it, streaming cloying incense into the air, and nodded to the two slave girls who were cleaning the steps. I had never been to Apulunas' temple before, but had I not seen it a thousand times from the tower in the walls? It was the largest in Troy, for Apulunas was the protector of our city and the greatest of the prophecy-giving gods. It was certain to be close by. I grasped Cassandra's hand and took a turn to the left.

And there it was. At the end of the alley, blocked off on either side by two tall mud-brick houses, the sloping wall of the precinct of Apulunas: five layers of enormous limestone blocks, each block almost half the height of a man, and laid on top of each other in uneven rows to the height of two grown men. Unlike the city walls, where the blocks of polished limestone fitted seamlessly together, the gaps here at their rough-hewn corners were so large that I could see between them into the sanctuary itself and make out the columns of the temple set against the sky behind.

‘We
are
going to the temple!' Cassandra exclaimed, as I started towards it. The street was empty, the windows of the houses covered with woven rugs to keep out the heat of the day, a stray cat curled up here and there on a front step. ‘Your father, Krisayis – we shall be in so much trouble …'

But I had already reached the wall, and was testing the gaps between the stones. They were large enough to fit my hands and feet with ease. I pulled myself up, fingers gripping the rough-chipped surface of the stone between the blocks as easily as if I were climbing the rungs of a ladder.