She turned as my shadow fell across her. “How is she?”
“Not good. She won’t last.”
“Probably just as well.”
I caught her looking at me curiously. The feud between my mother-in-law and me was well known. I said, rather defensively, perhaps, “She could’ve come with us. We could’ve carried her. She didn’t want to.”
The child whimpered and Ritsa brushed the hair back from his damp forehead. His mother was sitting only a few feet away, struggling with a fretful baby who wanted to suckle but was fighting the breast. She looked worn out. I wondered whether facing the future was harder if you were responsible for other lives. I had only my own burden to bear and, looking at that exhausted mother, I felt the freedom of that—and the loneliness. And then I thought that there were different ways of being connected to other people. Yes, I was childless—but I felt responsible for every woman and child in that room, not to mention the slaves crammed together in the basement.
As the heat intensified, most of the women settled down and tried to sleep. A few succeeded—for a time there was a rising chorus of snores and whistling breaths—but most just lay there staring listlessly at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and kept them closed while pulses throbbed in my temples and under my jaw. Then Achilles’s war cry came again, so close this time some of the women sat up and gazed fearfully around them. We all knew we were approaching the end.
An hour later, hearing the crash and splinter of wood breaking, I ran up onto the roof, leant over the parapet and saw Greek fighters spilling through a breach in the gates. Directly below me, a knot of writhing arms and shoulders advanced and then retreated as our men struggled to push the invaders back. No use, they were pouring through the breach, slashing and stabbing as they came. Soon, that peaceful square where the farmers held their weekend market was trampled red with blood. Now and then, for no apparent reason, a gap would open in the struggling ranks and in one of those momentary clearings I saw Achilles raise his plumed head and look towards the palace steps where my husband stood with two of my brothers by his side. The next thing I saw was Achilles hacking his way towards them. As he reached the steps, the guards came running down to bar his way. I saw him thrust his sword upwards into the pit of a man’s belly. Blood and urine spurted out, but the dying man, his face wiped clean of pain, cradled his spilling intestines as gently as a mother nurses her newborn child. I saw men’s mouths open like scarlet flowers but I couldn’t hear their screams. The noise of the battle kept coming and going, one minute deafening, the next muffled. I was gripping the parapet so hard my nails splintered on the rough stone. There were moments when I swear time stopped. My youngest brother—fourteen years old, barely able to lift my father’s sword—I saw him die. I saw the flash of the upraised spear, I saw my brother lying on the ground wriggling like a stuck pig. And at that moment Achilles, as if he had all the time in the world, turned his head and glanced up at the tower. He was looking straight at me, or so it seemed—I think I actually took a step back—but the sun was in his eyes, he couldn’t possibly have seen me. Then, with a kind of fastidious precision—I wish I could forget it, but I can’t—he put his foot on my brother’s neck and pulled the spear out. Blood spurted from the wound, my brother struggled for a full minute to go on breathing, and then lay still. I saw my father’s sword drop from his loosening grip.
Achilles had already moved on, to the next man, and the next. He killed sixty men that day.
The fiercest fighting was on the palace steps where my husband, poor, silly Mynes, fought bravely to defend his city—he who, until that day, had been a weak, boorish, vacillating boy. He died with both hands gripping Achilles’s spear, as if he thought it belonged to him and Achilles was trying to take it away. Mynes looked utterly astonished. My two older brothers died beside him. I don’t know how my third-oldest brother died, but somehow or other, whether by the gates or on the palace steps, he met his end. For the first and only time in my life, I was glad my mother was dead.
Every man in the city died that day, fighting at the gates or on the palace steps. Those who were too old to fight were dragged out of their houses and butchered in the street. I saw Achilles, blood-red from his plumed helmet to his sandalled feet, throw his arm across the shoulders of another young man, laughing in triumph. His spear, trailing behind him, cut a line through the red earth.
It was over in a matter of hours. By the time the shadows lengthened across the square, the palace steps were piled high with corpses, though the Greeks were busy for an hour after that, chasing stragglers, searching houses and gardens where the wounded might have tried to hide. When there were no men left to kill, the looting began. Men like columns of red ants passed goods from hand to hand, heaping them up close to the gates ready to carry them down to the ships. When they ran out of space they dragged the corpses to one side of the marketplace, stacking them against the walls of the citadel. Dogs drooling ropes of slobber began sniffing around the dead, their lean, angular, black shadows knife-edged on the white stone. Crows came flying in, squabbling as they settled on roofs and walls, lining every door and window frame like black snow. Noisy, to begin with, then quiet. Waiting.
The looting was better organized now. Gangs of men were dragging heavy loads out of the buildings—carved furniture, bales of rich cloth, tapestries, armour, tripods, cooking cauldrons, barrels of wine and grain. Now and then, the men would sit down and rest, some on the ground, some on the chairs and beds they’d been carrying. They were all swigging wine straight from the jug, wiping their mouths on the backs of their bloodstained hands, getting steadily and determinedly drunk. And more and more often, as the sky started to fade, they gazed up at the slit windows of the citadel where they knew the women would be hiding. The captains went from group to group, urging the men onto their feet again, and gradually they succeeded. A few final swigs and they were back at work.
For hours, I watched them strip houses and temples of wealth that generations of my people had worked hard to create, and they were so good at it, so practised. It was exactly like seeing a swarm of locusts settle onto a harvest field; you know they’re not going to leave even one ear of corn behind. I watched helplessly as the palace—my home—was stripped bare. By now many of the other women had joined me on the roof, but we were all too gripped by grief and fear to talk to each other. Gradually, the looting stopped—there was nothing left to take—and the drinking began in earnest. Several huge vats were wheeled into the square and jugs passed from man to man…
And then they turned their attention to us.
* * *
——————
The slave women in the basement were dragged out first. Still watching from the roof, I saw a woman raped repeatedly by a gang of men who were sharing a wine jug, passing it good-naturedly from hand to hand while waiting their turn. Her two sons—twelve, thirteen years old perhaps—lay wounded and dying a few yards away from her, though those few yards might as well have been a mile: she had no hope of reaching them. She kept stretching out her hands and calling their names as first one and then the other died. I turned away; I couldn’t bear to go on watching.