Sparta (Southern Peloponnesus) and Troy (Northeastern Turkey)
Like Polyphemus, the Cyclops, and Asterion, the Minotaur, Helen is a figure of myth — the most beautiful woman in the world, the “face that launched a thousand ships” as Christopher Marlowe wrote. We know, however, that there really could have been a war that brought down the ancient city of Troy (now the mound of Hisarlik) around 1180 BCE, just at the end of the Bronze Age. Suppose, then, that the characters from the Homeric epic, The Iliad, had been real? There would be no actual gods, goddesses, nymphs or sorceresses, although the people themselves would have believed in them.
What there would have been is real people living real lives through a turbulent and bloody era of warfare and change. If one of those people had been Helen, and if she were to tell the story of her life from the perspective of her old age, what would she tell? What would she tell of knowing Menelaus, Paris, Priam and Hecuba, Hector and Andromache, Cassandra, Odysseus, even Achilles and Briseis? What would she say about the war and the great horse? In this novel, she tells the story of her life, and all these people were part of it.
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Do you know that I once met the “great” Achilles? It was about a year after the Achaeans landed on the shores of Troy and encamped on the plains of the Scamander.
Within the walls of Troy itself there are many gardens like Cassandra’s. She let me share some of her space to grow flowers and vegetables. Her garden lay within the walls of the palace, three sides of which were within the city walls while the fourth, as it happened, did double duty as the city’s and the palace’s eastern or inland wall. That wall rose perhaps twenty feet above ground. Therefore much of the garden was in morning shade, but by the late morning or early afternoon it was in full sun.
Cassandra had planted some pear and apple trees along the inside that were espaliered on beautiful wooden trellises about ten feet high. At the base of the trees she gave me a nice plot of ground about eight feet wide and thirty feet long in which I planted various pulses including lentils and beans, and in front of those, cucumbers, onions, lettuces and garlic. I like garlic in my meat stews. Getting sea salt was not a problem, but I also like Egyptian pepper, which was very hard to get. I also planted some peppers from which I saved the seeds to replant in the spring.
I was, as usual, down on my knees cultivating the soil around the base of the plants. I was digging in some cut grass which enriches he soil. I also try to dig some cow or horse manure into the soil which I do with a spade before I plant. Menelaus and Paris both find it unseemly for a “queen” to use a shovel, but I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. Cow or horse manure enriches the soil, though I don’t know what its specific properties are or what magic it possesses. I just know that if you dig it into your soil before you plant, the plants grow taller and stronger and put on more fruit.
I was putting some dry cut grass around the bases of my plants, for it helps to hold in the moisture. I heard a loud thump off to my right as of something dropping from the top of the wall. I thought at first that one of the guards had dropped a stone or a flagon of wine, for they sometimes drink wine up there when they are supposed to be on guard duty. I looked around to see what the sound was, and I saw a man standing at the other end of the garden.
He had no armor on, but was dressed in a simple leather tunic with a broad belt around his waist. He had on not sandals but leather boots in the style of the Myrmidons. He was not a large man. I had several times seen Greater Ajax during skirmishes from the tops of the walls, and I remembered him from years ago when he came to court me. He was a truly gargantuan warrior at least six and a half feet tall and probably 280 or 300 pounds, none of it fat. By contrast, this young fellow, and he was young, stood no more than six feet tall and may have weighed 180 pounds. He was rather on the lean side, but with that sinewy kind of leanness in which muscles ripple like eddies in a stream just under the surface of the skin.
He carried a sword tucked into his belt, not in a scabbard, and had two eight-foot spears that he untwisted from a leather thong he’d strung across his back. I could see a bronze helmet was tied by a leather thong around his waist and dangled behind him. His spears had a peculiar point, not the leaf-shaped blade the Trojans and most of the Achaeans both used, but a more slender triangular blade, long and, as I could see, very sharp.
Oddly, I knew at once exactly who it was. And peculiarly, I wasn’t afraid.
“How did you get in here?” I asked simply. I stood and brushed dirt from my knees.
He laughed. . “Oh, I can get over your walls any time I want to. There’s not a lot to hold onto except small cracks where the stones are mortared, but that’s enough for me. I scaled the wall, hopped up not the top, and within about thirty seconds had slain the two guards who came running to confront me.” He laughed when he said this. “By Ares, I do enjoy killing Trojans! I wish I could behead them as I kill them and use their heads to decorate my private compound, but Agamemnon is against it. He thinks it’s uncivilized. Truthfully, I don’t give a shit what he thinks is civilized or not, but he’s the ‘big general’”—and here he laughed—“so I go along with his sense of decorum just to avoid unnecessary conflict. Still, maybe if we both live through the fall of your city, I’ll attack the Mycenaeans. I really don’t particularly like Agamemnon. Self important little shit and not a very good warrior.”
“You’re Achilles, aren’t you? No other man I’ve ever heard of could scale walls like a goat, kill two guards without blinking an eye, and before they could raise the alarm, and then hop down into my garden as nimble as a mountain goat.”
“Nimble as a mountain goat? I like that!” He laughed. “Nimble as a mountain goat! That’s absolutely precious!” He laughed again. “So, you’re Helen, no doubt.” He looked me up and down. “I’d advise you not to scream. I’ve already slain two of your guards; I’d hate to have to kill more. But I’d kill you first before the guards came.”
I suddenly felt coldly afraid. There was something about this young man, all of maybe nineteen or twenty at the time, that was positively eerie. He was like no one I had ever met. It’s not that he wasn’t particularly handsome (he wasn’t) or anything like that, but there was a singular coldness about him. A darkness, maybe. “You haven’t come to . . . .”
“To kill you? To ravish you?”
— Excerpt from Chapter Eleven: The Garden of Achilles