She was glad of it when she found herself at what she thought was another dead end. About to give in to despair, she stared into the smoke and thought she might see a smaller path to the left, running between two houses. She was trying to remember whose homes they were, and work out where she might be, when a gang of soldiers erupted from the one furthest away. Creusa shrank back against the front wall of the building opposite the men, but they did not see her. They laughed as they ran down the alleyway which Creusa planned to use. She did not need to hear their words to know that the men had killed whoever they had found inside. Creusa waited for the men to disappear before she dared follow. Having tried so hard to remember whose house she was passing, she was grateful that she had failed. She did not want to know whose throat the men had just slit.
She dragged her fingers along the wall beside her, making her way more slowly now, to be sure that the men would not see her behind them. When the passageway finally opened out into the street again, she saw that she had done it. She had found her way to the city walls.
* * *
‘Take the horse,’ Sinon said. ‘In so doing, you will take its power from them. They built it here and dedicated it to Athene, protector of the Greeks. They believed it to be so large that you Trojans would have no chance of dragging it away into your city. They saw the distance across the plains, the height of your acropolis, and they laughed at the notion that you could take it for yourselves.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Hecabe. Her Greek was rudimentary, but clear.
‘Forgive me, queen, I do not understand,’ replied the prisoner.
‘How do you know what they thought about the horse?’ she repeated. ‘If you were hiding in the reeds, fearing for your life. You say they built the horse after you had run away. So how do you know what was said?’
Creusa thought she saw a flicker of annoyance cross the man’s face. But when he spoke again, his voice was still quavering with sorrow.
‘It had been their original plan, my lady. Before Calchas and Odysseus cooked up their plot against me. The Greeks wanted to build a giant horse and invest it with all the sacred power they could. Then they wanted to leave it outside your city to taunt you: a sign of the goddess guiding them home safely. It is the kind of arrogant gesture that Agamemnon cannot resist.’ Hecabe frowned but said no more.
‘So please, king,’ he added. ‘Rob them of their safe voyage home. Take their horse to your citadel before nightfall. It could be dragged by your men. I will set my own shoulder to the ropes if you will only permit me. Anything to punish those impious Greeks who would have taken my life without hesitation. If you let me help you drag the horse into your city and up to its highest point, I will fall on the sword of any of your men the moment the task is completed. I swear it.’
‘No.’ Laocoon the priest could keep himself in check no longer. ‘I beg you, king. The horse is cursed and so shall we be, if we allow it in our city. The man speaks with a false tongue. Either he deceives or he is deceived. But the horse must not come inside our city walls. Let us burn it, as I proposed.’ He lifted his meaty arm and flung the spear he held into the horse’s flank. It vibrated for a moment, humming in the shocked silence which followed his words.
Creusa could not be sure what happened next. She didn’t see the snakes for herself, though many others claimed to have done so. She wasn’t looking at the reeds. She was looking at the man, Sinon, and his filthy, unreadable face. The only sign that he could understand Laocoon’s words was the shiver of his biceps against the ropes which still held him. She thought Laocoon’s children had simply run out into the water. Why wouldn’t they? They had long since tired of hearing the men argue and – like all the other children of Troy – they had never been down to the shore before, never played in the sand. So of course they had wandered off, following the river a little way until they reached the waves on the beach. The two of them had waded out into the shallows before anyone noticed they were gone.
The seaweed grew in huge fronds, Creusa knew. As a child, her nurse had warned her never to enter the water in search of the dark green tentacles. While the seaweed’s fingertips were thin enough for a child to tear, the body of the plant was thick and fibrous. It would have been all too easy to stumble and lose her footing. And that was surely what had happened to Laocoon’s children. One of them must have caught his foot in a loop of seaweed and fallen. Unused to the current, he panicked and, writhing, entangled himself further. The other, ploughing over to help his brother who had slid right under the water, found himself in the same predicament. His thin cries for help were carried away by the shore breeze.
But by the time Laocoon had run – too late – to save them, the seaweed had taken on a malevolent form. Giant sea-snakes sent by the gods, someone said, to punish the priest for defiling their offering with his spear. As soon as the words had been spoken, they had believers.
As the priest wept on the sand, cradling the bodies of his drowned children, Priam’s choice could hardly have been different. The gods had punished the priest, so the Trojans must heed the warning and follow the words of the prisoner, Sinon. They laid logs beneath the horse and dragged it across the plains, the men taking turns to heave on the ropes. They rolled it through the city, though it barely fitted into the indentations of cart-tracks which cut through the streets. They drew it up onto the citadel and cheered when it reached the highest point and the men rubbed their aching arms and rolled up their ropes. Priam declared a sacrifice must be made to the gods, and a feast would follow. The Trojans cheered again as the fires were lit and the meat cooked. They poured wine first for the gods and then for themselves. Troy had won the war at last.
* * *
And Creusa turned and looked back at her burning city. She had made it to the walls but now she could see that the fire had reached them before her. She could not follow the walls around to the city gates as she had planned: the paths were ablaze. If she could have climbed the wall where she now stood, she could perhaps still have escaped. But it was too high, too sheer, and she had nothing to cling on to. The men she had followed were no longer a threat to her: choked on the thick smoke, they had lost their lives in the pursuit of carnage. She could see their bodies on the ground ahead of her, already being claimed by the fire.
She understood her predicament far more quickly than the birds which were singing overhead – on roofs which had not yet burned – though the sky was black, the moon obliterated by thick grey smoke. The fires across the city were so bright, they thought it was morning, and Creusa knew she would remember this oddity – the fire and the birds and the night made day – for as long as she lived.
And she did, though it mattered little, because she was dead long before dawn.
3
The Trojan Women
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.