So Hecabe knew that if she could have kept one of her women with her, over the months and years to come, it would be Polyxena. Her most beautiful daughter. The youngest, with golden hair quite unlike any other Trojan woman. People used to say that a goddess must have favoured her with such beauty and yet Polyxena was never conceited. She was a kind and thoughtful girl, everyone’s favourite. Hecabe shuddered, thinking which Greek would take her. The butcher Neoptolemus, who had cut down Priam, Polyxena’s father, as he clung to the altars and pleaded for sanctuary? The devious Odysseus? The idiot Menelaus?
She said nothing, but Polyxena suddenly grew restless, as if she could sense her mother’s thoughts. She stretched her arms above her head and sat up on her heels. ‘I don’t think it was the Amazon,’ she said. Her mother bit back her irritable retort. She already had one daughter whose every utterance was meaningless, she had no need for another.
‘You don’t think what was the Amazon?’ asked Andromache quietly. She had found her tongue again at last. But the baby still slept and she hoped to keep him that way. When he awoke, he would be ravenous, and she had only a little milk-softened grain to give to him.
‘Troy didn’t fall because of the death of Penthesilea,’ Polyxena said. ‘It fell because the gods willed it so. We were almost saved before, remember? But the gods must have changed their minds. Even an Amazon could have made no difference then.’
‘Before?’
‘When they took the priest’s daughter, Mama. And the girl from Lyrnessus.’
10
Briseis and Chryseis
No one ever needed to ask which priest’s daughter, although Troy had plenty of priests and they had plenty of daughters. If someone was talking about the daughter of a priest, they always meant Chryseis, daughter of Chryses. Who else would have been sufficiently cunning to escape a besieged city, and sufficiently careless to be captured by the Greeks?
They stabbed the shepherd boy she had been sneaking outside to meet, who tended his flocks on the lower slopes of the mountains. He had been mortally afraid that the Greeks would catch sight of him on a moonlit night, and kill him, taking his flock to sate their hunger. But he never shared his anxiety with her, because he was shy and he did not wish to appear afraid in front of a girl who seemed entirely without fear. And so, when the night finally came that a pair of Greek scouts – hunting around the edges of the city like weasels looking for birds’ eggs – found them, she was entirely unprepared for what would happen.
They killed him exactly as he feared they would. But she didn’t see his blood flow out from his chest, because it was too dark, and she had dropped her torch when the men attacked and knocked it from her grip. The ground was damp, and its flame was extinguished straightaway. She felt the men’s greasy hands on her flesh and on her clothes as they dragged her back to the camp. She was frightened, but she did not cry out, because she was still more worried that the Trojans would find her than that the Greeks would kill her, even though she realized this was ridiculous. She thought of the sweet soft mouth of the shepherd boy, and felt a sudden twisting hurt in her side that she would never kiss it again.
As the men pulled her towards the shoreline, away from the city, she caught sight of the sacred flames burning in the temple of Apollo, on the citadel of Troy. Her father would be serving the god at this hour. The pain she had felt at the loss of her shepherd boy redoubled when she acknowledged to herself that she had abandoned her father.
Chryses was a broad-backed, black-haired servant of Apollo, whose wife had died giving birth to their daughter. Her lifeblood had ebbed out with the baby and had never stopped. Wan and grey, with matted locks of hair stuck to her pale cheeks, she died before her daughter was a day old. Her heartbroken widower had no appetite for fatherhood, and gave the child, still unnamed, to a wet-nurse with no instruction as to whether she should be fed or left to die on the slopes of Mount Ida. By the time his grief had subsided and he could bear to have the girl in his presence, his daughter had been named by others: Chryseis, daughter of Chryses.
Chryseis took after her mother. Dark brown hair flowed over her shoulders and her eyes were almost black. Her skin was golden, and she took small, neat steps, like a dancer. But where her mother had been a patient, obedient woman, always where she should be, shuttle in one hand and wool in the other, Chryseis was as headstrong as a donkey. People said the troublesome spirit had entered her when she was a baby, because they could think of no other explanation for why, if there was any trouble inside the city, Chryseis always seemed to be involved.
And now she had found herself in trouble outside the city. The youngest Trojans had grown up under a siege: they knew no other life. For Chryseis, only sixteen years old in this tenth year of the war, the city was her home and her prison alike. But unlike the daughters of Priam – Polyxena and the others – she refused to be contained. The city was riddled with secret pathways which could take an adventurous girl out into the plains below, if she was only daring enough to find them. It never occurred to her that the other sons and daughters of Troy might not have been looking to escape the city, or that the pathways went unused from fear rather than ignorance.
There was one such path, which tunnelled beneath the city walls, behind the temple of Apollo where her father spent his days. It was this one Chryseis had used to escape and meet her shepherd. She felt a fresh pang of sorrow for the soft-mouthed boy, and then a sharp jab of anger at her father who had left his bored, resourceful daughter alone for hours outside the temple while he tended to the god’s needs. He knew she would get up to mischief; she often did. She had been beaten once, by a senior priest, for playing with the goat kids which were kept outside the precincts for sacrifices. They were not pets, he had shouted as his large square hands slapped her face and arms, they were sacred animals. How dare she pollute them with her childish touch? Her father stood by and watched the man hit his daughter. It took time for her to unpick his expression, but eventually she concluded he had been embarrassed that she had brought shame on him. And yet he had left her to amuse herself, knowing she would get into trouble. Another emotion assailed her: perhaps he had not cared what happened to her. Perhaps she had tried his patience too often, embarrassed him too profoundly.
She had been wondering if she might try running from the Greek scouts, neither of whom looked as if he had the speed she knew she could produce. But the thought of her father’s disappointed face when he saw her and the memory of his mortification when she had been caught for other, lesser infractions kept her from making her escape. It distracted her and she did not notice her pace was slowing, until one of the Greek soldiers prodded her waist, grabbing at her flesh and laughing when she screamed.
Fear of upsetting her father had been a much greater influence on her behaviour than anything else, she realized. Since she had discovered the tunnel, she had explored the edges of the plains and the lower reaches of the mountains many times, hiding behind the trees and the rocks so that she wouldn’t be seen by the Trojan watchmen or anyone else who might tell Chryses. It had never occurred to her that she might be caught by Greek soldiers and slaughtered where she stood, her blood staining the grassy nubs in the sand beneath her feet. It had also never occurred to her that being captured by the Greeks might be worse than being killed by them.