Memoirs of a Bitch (15 page)

He looked at me. “I thought you came to Troy because you were bored.”

I met his eyes. “I thought I'd come for love. But I made a mistake. And boredom's not something you can cure by changing your home.”

I turned to go but Hector stopped me. I felt him touch me for the first time. Not from duty or courtesy. But to hold me back. I smiled. “What's going on, Hector of Troy? Has the imperfect lust of men affected even you?” He seemed to have missed the irony in my voice. He was breathing heavily but didn't let go. When he spoke his voice broke. “Don't laugh.”

“Why not? Like Paris, you'd take me, then go off when you got tired of me. But you've come rather late. Perhaps you should have come to Sparta that time with the delegation.”

I pulled my wrist away from him and set off down the path with a springy step as if I was a child again, feeling strangely weightless as the horizon began to sink behind the uneven line of houses. Hector caught me up.

“I won't touch you if you don't want me to.” His voice was hoarse, his hands hanging by his sides.

“I don't find that easy to believe,” I said savagely.

“Then you've only known worthless men.”

He was serious. There was nothing superficial about Hector, there could not be if he was to live and die the way he did live and die. A spirit of earth, not of fire. I started walking again, and he followed. I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck, every fiber in me conscious of that tense body walking slowly behind me. It was strange to think I had been so quick to follow him out of that door, attracted by the promise of the sky and his silhouette against the clear light. He was beautiful, Hector, as I realized with painful clarity when he left me at the palace gate, his strong, perhaps rather too tall, body moving away from me with firm if not entirely well coordinated steps. No, not all the men I had known had been worthless, but Paris had made me bitter in heart and body.

Don't worry, Helen. There's plenty of time. Hector's not in any hurry.

I started abruptly, still leaning on the door jamb,
intently searching what was now a clear night. It sounded like Cassandra's voice, but I couldn't see her. The wind rose, and I wondered if those constant gusts might not be carrying away my reason. Then I remembered Hector's eyes, and forgot everything else.

In my apartment, Callira had already lit the braziers.

Winter runs through cold rooms padded with woolen shawls, while outside in the icy biting wind of Troy, the Greek defenses are covered with shining frost. The frozen dew is white on chariots left in the open, and winds have closed the Hellespont. And the allies of Troy, complaining of the cold, have still not come. Priam nods, hanging his head as if he still believes in them. No more Bactrian dancing girls, and no braziers to dispel the foggy clouds of condensing breath. Paris sleeps in a different bed each night, and Helen the bitch no longer has anything to say at all.

The path up to the temple was swept by furious gales, sharp-edged shields of cold wind that slashed one's ankles like knives. I pulled my shawl over my head to stop the wind loosening the knot holding my hair in place and fumbling inquisitively under my tunic. The slender Aricia was waiting for me at the gate, her big loose mantle attacked by icy gusts; I ran up the steps and once we were inside it took our combined strength to close the door. The crash of wood echoed through the empty temple like a dismal drum; Aricia trembled and loosened her cloak, and beckoned me to go with her toward the warmer dormitory area.

I followed the young novice, Cassandra's favorite, down a covered corridor and up a flight of stairs. Cassandra's room was at the top. Aricia went in without
knocking, then stepped aside to let me pass. Cassandra was sitting cross-legged on the bed, examining the contents of a bowl of metal beads.

“Come in, Helen,” she said without looking up; I laid my shawl on the table and sat down at the head of the bed.

“You can stay if you like, Aricia,” she added encouragingly, but, blushing under her fringe of yellow hair, the girl responded with a terrified stammer.

“I … no, thank you … you're too kind … I …” Tripping over her own feet, she fled so that the rest of her mumbled and broken words were lost on the far side of the heavy wooden door.

Looking up, Cassandra smiled. “An adorable girl,” she said, “though maybe brought on a little too quickly. She's in love with me; I hope she gets over it soon. When she was still capable of normal conversation it was a pleasure to be with her.”

I smiled too. “Of course she'll get over it. After all, you're her teacher …”

“And sister and confidante. Her family wanted to keep her dowry, I suppose.” Her tone was light, but there was a profound bitterness in her sharp features. Putting aside the bowl of beads, she went over to the mirror. With her back to me she grasped the table with both hands and breathed deeply once, twice, thrice. Her knuckles
turned white and her wrists stiffened. I said nothing; in the world of her anger, Cassandra was on her own. I looked absentmindedly out of the window; beyond the barred shutters the world was screaming a protest at the brutality of the storm. Still absentminded, I reached for the bowl on the bed and shook it so that the beads sang.

“Aeneas brought me those,” explained Cassandra, suddenly turning with a smile on her pursed lips. She nervously pushed back her hair. “They made a sortie on horseback beyond Ida. Carrying yet another fruitless message, I expect. He bought these beads on the shores of Colchis. For me.”

She sat down on the bed again, taking the bowl in her hands and turning it three times. Metal hissed against metal like a serpent. Then, her dark eyes nearly black, she turned the bowl one more time as if waiting for something. Perhaps for words in some language I could not understand. I looked away uneasily. “That was a nice thought.”

There was something in the sudden blossoming of Cassandra's smile, in her irrational swing from one mood to another, that suggested the madness they attributed to her. Now she answered in a dreamy voice: “The future's simply in the bowl. Better than frothing and shaking, I suppose.”

She was as tough as Hector, and there were no nuances for her.

“The future?”

She nodded. “The nomads foretell the future with iron beads. I imagine my usual prophetic fits would knock them off their horses.” She smiled again; it might have been a joke, but the beads were still turning in the bowl, and as I watched they formed an indistinct spiral, a chain of gray light.

“Ask,” murmured Cassandra.

So I asked my question of gods whose voices I did not know; the bowl tilted and the gray chain was broken. Beads fell from the bed like solid drops of water, bouncing on the beaten earth floor and rolling away between the legs of the chair. Cassandra watched them for a moment, then began murmuring in a low voice, her lips scarcely moving and her eyes far away. Finally she murmured, “Ten,” and tightened her fingers slightly on the edge of the bowl.

I felt blood drain from my cheeks and hide in distant corners of my body as if my heart had stopped beating. For a long moment Cassandra went on concentrating in silence; then turned to me again. She reached for my hand; her own was surprisingly warm.

“It is a long time for a war, you're right.” I could feel veins of marble down my back and looked at her, knowing she would be smiling.

“What …?”

“Don't ask questions when you don't want to hear the answers, Helen from Sparta,” she said briskly, springing nimbly from the bed to pick up the fallen beads.

“Ten,” she said again. “And one already gone.” One bead slipped from her fingers and rolled against the door jamb. She left it and turned toward me with the bowl still in her hands.

It was silly to be afraid of a bowl of iron beads, but my skin was unused to the cold and my throat was dry. “Put them away.”

Cassandra nodded indulgently, and bowl and beads disappeared into an engraved wooden box on the table. The uncertain light of the lamp captured the soft glow of an amber necklace.

“Was that a present from Aeneas too?” My tongue was running away with me, and I felt I must pay a price for my fear. But Cassandra was not disconcerted.

“Aeneas son of Anchises has often brought me presents. And I have accepted them whenever possible.” I could not read her expression; her eyes as she sat beside me were fixed on empty space and her hands were around her knees. She rocked herself gently.

“Yes, it is as you think, Helen,” she added slowly, her voice far away, “but I haven't betrayed the dumb cruel
god of these walls. The love of mortals is a small thing; though it can warm you, even at a distance.”

Suddenly I remembered my first day in Troy; the hands of Aeneas on Cassandra's wrists, removing her with gentle force, and the endless military maneuvers of Hector through the streets, Aeneas behind him with a dark shadow under his eyes.

An ant slowly began crossing the floor as though it had all the time in the world. And perhaps it did, since it could not know that it must die.

“He was happier once, even though he knew the day must come when the doors would close behind me. He used to smile, did Aeneas, a lovely smile. But Hector never smiled, even when we were children. They call me mad, but Hector knows. He has no need of shouting, no need of laurel.”

Suddenly she looked up, and in the dying light from the lamp which had almost gone out, her eyes had neither pupils nor color.

“Forget Paris, Helen. But don't run away.”

I'm certain she could no longer see me when I got up and went to the door. She did not move but was softly humming a slow tune, her eyes fixed on the ant still on its way across the room.

I had never welcomed the wind of Troy so sincerely as when it assailed me fiercely at the gate. I didn't even hide behind my shawl but let it attack me and bring tears to my eyes. I could barely see a couple of steps in front of me, and the sea was a black abyss with the power to sweep away the entire Greek race. I was alone in the cold, alone in a way I had not known for many years; and my grief at the loss of Paris was swallowed up in the wind that pierced my skin, tearing at my muscles till they almost bled. Paris had been my love, I had wanted him and believed in him. I had given him everything; there was no corner of me I had not exposed to him, revealed to him. And one offense had been enough to make him want to detach himself from me, and return to what, Callira whispered softly that evening, had always been his real life.

Disillusion and scorn had provided me with a safe haven and sealed my wound with stitches of fire, but now the wound had come open. I dropped to my knees on paving stones as cold as the invisible sea beyond the wind. Paris. I hated the memory of his body on mine, corrupted forever by his estrangement. I tried to remember his face on that moonlit night in the port of Amyclae, but the wind slashed it away, bringing back my moans and his, distorted, destroyed by the lamentations of an impure love. I had believed it was real love, I wanted to shout; and months of denial were turning in me a dagger of silent fury. The wind mocked me with long-ago memories of the eyes of Diomedes and the hands of Achilles, destroyed from one day to the next without me even noticing, and superimposed on the unbelievable eyes of Achilles were the eyes of Hermione whom I had left behind forever, and my abandonment of her stopped my throat and took away my breath.

Diomedes. Achilles. Hermione. And my nameless ghost swept away without regret or scruple by the wind. Hermione. Achilles. Diomedes. My mourning dirge emphasized the stupidity of my mistaken flight, the only thing I should have said no to. But I had been hardly more than a child then, a voice inside me tried to implore, all pride lost; but the only reply that came on the wind was the mocking voice of Theseus returned from the
dead to torment me: It was boredom, not love; is that what you're saying, Helen, you coward? You know only too well that you'd like to suffer for Paris and weep for love, but you can't do that any longer because your heart was cremated on that pyre, remember? You should have let me carry you off; you're like me, and now all that is left is the imprint of your dead love.

The wind was laughing at me and Theseus with it. It would have been pointless to put my hands over my ears or lower my eyes. I'm made of stone, insisted an ever more plaintive voice; but it was no longer true, and even if it had been true it would have meant nothing.

I opened my eyes to a world of hot steam. I could vaguely remember a woman stretched on the ground with her shawl thrown like a black crow over her head by the wind, and of a man emerging from the wind to carry her away, his arms like dark snakes of unexpected salvation. Beyond that was only the warmth. I opened my eyes to see spears, a whole wall covered with them, reaching from one side of the room to the other. One corner of the room was occupied by a shield, and beside it a helm with a long, lugubrious black horsetail plume.

Hector was sitting on a low stool in the opposite corner; he got up and came toward me.

“How are you?” He knelt down on the floor, his face
close to mine; I could see my reflection in his eyes, a reflection stamped with lineaments of anguish. I wrapped myself more tightly in the coverlet that someone, perhaps he himself, had laid over me. The bed was narrow, but even when I stretched my legs I could not reach the end of it. It was his bed; when he stood up I looked around the room again, but apart from the weapons and the stool it held nothing but a long wooden chest. The Crown Prince of Troy lived in an armory and slept on a camp bed.

He came toward me again, carrying a cup. “Drink.”

I obeyed. My tongue shuddered at the sour taste of goat's milk even though warm and sweetened by honey. I emptied the earthenware goblet in a single draft and gave it back to him. He put it down on the floor while his dark eyes, Cassandra's eyes, continued to watch me.