The women were waiting on the shore, gazing blank-eyed at the sea. The tang of dried green seaweed and bent brown reed stalks fought against the stench of smoke which filled their clothes and matted hair. After two days, the Greeks were finally completing their systematic looting of the blackened city, and as the women waited to find out who they now belonged to, they huddled around their queen as though her last embers might keep them warm.
Hecabe, a small, leathery figure with half-hidden eyes, sat on a low rock worn smooth by water and salt. She tried not to think of her husband, Priam, cut down by the vicious Greek as he clung to an altar, his dark blood trickling down his chest as his head drooped back from his murderer’s blade. Something else she had learned as the city fell: the old did not die like the young. Even their blood was slower.
Her mouth hardened. The thug who slaughtered him – an old man pleading for the protection of a god – would pay for his cruelty, his disrespect, his impiety. It was the only thing she could cling to, now everything else was lost: a man could not expect to disregard the sanctity of a god’s temple and continue to live and thrive. There were rules. Even in war, there were rules. Men might ignore them, but the gods would not. And to slaughter a man as he bent his stiffening knees to seek sanctuary? Such behaviour was unforgiveable and the gods – as the queen of the smoking remains of Troy knew all too well – were rarely prone to forgive.
She bit the inside of her cheek, welcoming the metallic taste. She began the list again in her mind, the sons who had died in combat, the sons who had died in ambushes, the sons who had died two nights ago, in the sacking of the city. With the death of each one, another part of her dried up, like animal skins left too long in the sun. Eventually, she had thought, when Hector died, when the butcher Achilles took her bravest warrior-son, there was nothing of her left to shrivel up. But one of the gods – she dared not say Hera’s name – must have heard even that hubristic thought, and decided to punish her further. And all because of a woman. All because of that conniving Spartan whore. She spat the blood out, onto the sand. Her desire for revenge was total, and futile.
She caught sight of a bird, turning on the wind, and flying back towards the shore. Was it a sign? The flight of birds was known to carry messages from the gods, but only skilled priests could read the language of wings. Still, she was sure this message was a simple one, reminding her that there was one boy – one, of all her beautiful sons, so tall, so strong – one still left alive.
And only because the Greeks did not know where he was, or even that he was. Her last, youngest son, bundled out of the city under the cover of night, and hidden away with an old friend in Thrace. A friend whom they had paid handsomely. Even allies needed encouragement to support a losing side, Priam had said. And Troy had been the losing side for so long: only strong walls and obstinacy had kept her firm against the Greeks for ten long years.
She and Priam had wrapped the boy’s belongings around four twisted gold circlets, and tied the pack closed before he left. ‘Give two to your host when you arrive,’ they said. ‘Hide the other two and never let on to anyone that you have them.’ ‘Then what good are they to me?’ he asked, a ready, trusting boy. ‘You will know if you need them,’ she had answered, resting her fingers on his shoulder so she could look him in the eyes, tall as he was. ‘Men will do more for a stranger if he has a nub of gold to offer.’ She showed him how the soft metal branches would give beneath his hands, allowing him to snap off a smaller bribe if need be.
They said nothing to the slave who accompanied their son: the lure of gold would be too strong, and her boy would have a knife between two ribs before he was a day’s ride from home. Secrecy was vital, and she prayed to the gods that her son would realize that his life was at stake if he could not keep quiet. Her husband had warned him, and so had she. He was not her last surviving son when he kissed her the final time and set out through a little-known passage on the north side of the city. But she had known, even as she wept and bid him farewell, that he would be.
She felt a brief shudder run through her, and tightened her stole around her shoulders. The Greeks were taking their time in the city. Picking over every corner in case they had missed something bright; as grasping as jackdaws. Gold and bronze had been pilfered from every hiding place, piled up on the sand to be divided up among the men. Carefully, since the inequitable distribution of booty had caused them no end of trouble in the past year. There would be some trickery, of course. Men had already been caught stuffing small pieces of precious metal into their clothing. One Greek, she had heard, had been found by his comrades with a gold ring wedged between his cheek and his teeth, and had been slashed across the face for his deception. He would hide nothing in his cheek now. Not even his teeth.
The women were waiting, powerless and broken. What happened after the end of the world? Polyxena sat at her mother’s feet, absently rubbing her hand up and down her mother’s calf like a small child. Andromache sat slightly apart from her mother-in-law. She was not born a Trojan, but had married Hector and become one of them. Her baby nestled beneath her chin, grizzling a little – the noise and panic had disturbed his sleep. And Cassandra faced the ocean, her mouth moving soundlessly. She had long since learned to keep quiet, even if she could not halt the stream of words flowing from her lips.
None of the women wept. The dead husbands, fathers, brothers and sons were fresh wounds to them all. They had mourned through the nights and torn their hair and garments. But the Greek men who guarded them had little time for lamentation. Polyxena nursed a blackened bruise on her eye socket, and now the women were silent. Each promised herself and the others that they would grieve in solitude when they could. But all knew that they would never know solitude again. When a war was ended, the men lost their lives. But the women lost everything else. And victory had made the Greeks no kinder.
Polyxena issued a low, guttural cry, which merged with the chatter of the cormorants and went unheard by their captors. No matter how hard she tried to suppress her grief, she could not help herself. ‘Could this have been avoided?’ she asked her mother. ‘Did Troy have to fall? Was there no point when we could have been saved?’
Cassandra’s shoulders quivered with the effort of not screaming. She shook with the force of her desire to shout that she had told them a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times. And that none of them had listened, not once, not for a heartbeat. They didn’t hear, they couldn’t see, and yet she could see nothing but the future, all the time, forever. Well, not forever. She could see her own future as clearly as she saw everything else. Its brevity was her one consolation.
Hecabe looked down at her daughter and ran her fingers over Polyxena’s hair. She did not notice the thin film of soot it left behind on her palm. She could not look at her hands touching her daughter, knowing as she did that the hands of a Greek would be defiling her before the night came. The only question was which man would have each of her daughters, her daughters-in-law. Who, not if or when.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The gods know, you must ask them.’ And as she looked out at the sea, over the heads of her battered retinue, she realized that one of the Trojan women was missing. ‘Where is Theano?’ she asked.