Hecabe looked around at the women and children who surrounded her, trying to count them all. She hoped there were a few missing families, a handful of Trojans who might have slipped away in the smoking chaos. She counted her daughters and daughters-in-law before moving on to the other women. She realized that soft-tempered Creusa wasn’t there. Her husband Aeneas had survived ten years of conflict; had he died when the city was set ablaze? Or had he escaped with Creusa and their son? Hecabe issued a quick prayer to Aphrodite that it was so. Perhaps, even as she watched the birds feasting on the water, Aeneas and his wife were sailing out across the horizon to find a new home, far from the ravaging Greek soldiers.
‘Who else is missing?’ she asked Polyxena, who lay on the sand nearby, her back to her mother. Her daughter did not reply. Perhaps she was asleep. Hecabe counted again. Creusa, Theano and Theano’s daughter, Crino. All gone.
A young woman with hollow eyes and pale skin, sitting near Polyxena, holding a small comb in her hand – wood, not ivory, so perhaps she would be allowed to keep it – answered for her. Hecabe couldn’t find the young woman’s name in her mind. The upheaval was too great. She was the daughter of . . . No. That too had gone.
‘Theano’s family was spared,’ she said.
‘Spared?’ Hecabe looked at the girl in astonishment. The Greeks had not appeared to her to be in the mood for sparing anyone. ‘Why?’
But even as she said it, she knew. She knew that Antenor had betrayed them. His cautious counsel to appeal to the Greeks and ask for terms on which the Trojans could return Helen had not been advice for the benefit of his city, but for the benefit of himself.
The young woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just saw the soldiers pass their house by. There was a leopard skin nailed to the door. The Greeks saw it and they took their swords and their torches to the next house. It was a sign.’ She stopped. The next house had been the one before her own.
Hecabe snorted. The double-faced traitors, friends to their enemies, enemies to their friends. But even as she opened her mouth to express her contempt for such treachery, she paused. Antenor’s behaviour was despicable, certainly, but there was no denying that he had won a better fate for his women than Priam had for his own family. Theano and Crino: free women; Hecabe and her daughters: enslaved.
She saw that Andromache, her son Hector’s wife (Hector’s widow, she corrected herself again), was listening to her conversation. Andromache did not speak, however. She had not spoken since the day before, when the Greek soldiers brought her out of the city, pushing her between themselves, grabbing at her breasts and laughing, before shoving her into the circle of Trojan women. Andromache had held her baby tightly in her arms as she fell forward onto her knees. She did not notice when her ankle, scraped along the sharp edge of a rock, began to bleed. Hecabe had glared at the men, and one of them made a sign to ward off the evil eye. Hecabe snorted. It would take more than a gesture to combat the bottomless sea of sorrows she was wishing upon them all.
Hecabe wondered if Andromache was doing the same thing as she was, stacking up the names in her mind. Creusa was dead or had escaped somehow. But Theano, Crino: their names would be added to the curses Hecabe ran through every morning when she woke and every night before she slept. She was not so foolish as to believe that she herself would have the chance to punish all the traitors and murderers and wrongdoers who had contributed to the downfall of her city. But she would have the gods remember who they were. They would take vengeance on the oath-breakers. It was all she could wish for.
She would have been startled to discover that her daughter-in-law was doing precisely the opposite thing in her mind. Creusa, Theano, Crino: three Trojan women at least who were free, either in death or in life. Andromache marked each one with a silent joy. Everywhere she looked she could see only women in her own condition: fallen into slavery, the property of soldiers and thugs. But there were three who belonged to no one.
Polyxena awoke with a sudden cry. No one chided her, though the Greek soldiers who had been charged with keeping the women together looked over in annoyance. They all had nightmares now. Hecabe watched her daughter’s breathing slow again, as she saw where she was. Still living in a nightmare, but a lesser one than the one in her sleep. Polyxena moaned quietly as she sat up at her mother’s knee. ‘I keep dreaming that the city still stands.’
Hecabe nodded. She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.
‘When did you know they would take Troy?’ asked Polyxena.
Her mother thought for a moment. ‘We knew this day would come when the Amazon fell,’ she said. ‘Your father and I guessed before then. But the day the Amazon died; that’s when we knew for sure.’
7
Penthesilea
They were so alike, the Amazon girls, that when Hippolyta died, Penthesilea felt she had been deprived of more than a sister. She had lost her own reflection. For as long as she could remember, she had known what she looked like by looking at someone else: every shift in her own skin, every line, every scar almost, was matched on the body of the one she loved the most. And so as Hippolyta fell – her face creased with pain, the arrow piercing her ribs – Penthesilea knew that she was losing her sister and herself at once.
They had always used weapons. Long before she could walk, Hippolyta had taught Penthesilea to sling stones across their mother’s halls. The older they grew, the sharper the blades became: wooden swords and soft-wood spears were soon exchanged for the real things. And she had revelled in it. They both had. There was something so immeasurably delightful about being young and strong. The girls would ride for hours on near-identical horses: gentle trotting and then cantering and then galloping through the lower reaches of the mountains, their hair plaited tightly to hold it in place, pinned beneath their bright leather caps. They would dismount in the outskirts of the forest, and leave the horses, running until they collapsed on the ground, too breathless to groan at the pain in their lungs. They would lie amid the pine cones and look up at the sky between the upper branches of the trees, and know there was no one alive who was happier than them.
And the games they used to play. Running up the slopes, picking up white pebbles, or an abandoned birds’ nest, running back to the bottom of the hill to add it to a pile of woodland treasures, each one eyeing the other’s growing hoard with envy, marvelling at her swiftness and strength. And the speed test, which Hippolyta always won. The two girls would stand beside one another on open ground, and count themselves down: ready, steady, go. Penthesilea would fit an arrow to her bow, and shoot it high in an elegant parabola. At the same time, Hippolyta would begin to run, laughing at her own ability to cover so much ground so quickly that by the time the arrow began to descend, she was waiting, ready to catch it in her hand. She never failed, until the last time.
And so Penthesilea had lost her sister, dearer to her than life itself. Not only that but she had killed her. An accident, the others said, trying to comfort her. As though there could ever be any consolation for this. And because she had lost the thing she held most dear, and because she had not merely lost it but had herself destroyed it, and because there was no possibility that she could go on living without Hippolyta, Penthesilea resolved to die.