Glyn Iliffe - The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

Helen groaned.

‘Why did you leave me, Paris?’

And then, on the sighing of the wind, she thought she heard a voice answer her.

‘Come,’ it said. ‘Come to me.’

She sat on the stone sill and drew her knees up beneath her chin, looking down at the long drop. Her befuddled mind tried to calculate if it was enough – enough to kill her. She thought it was; all she had to do was relax and lean sideways. That was all, and then the torment of being apart from Paris would be over. The forgetfulness of Hades would envelop her. Helen of Troy would be no more.

But not the war. That would go on regardless of her fate. Thousands more would perish. Thousands more widows and orphans would have personal reason to hate her memory. Even though she would be gone and Agamemnon and Priam’s fight would become openly the struggle for power it had always been, they would still blame her as the spark that brought death to their husbands and fathers. And that was why she could not just take her own life. The only way to end the war was to find a way back to Menelaus. If she was with her first husband again, the oath taken by the other kings would no longer hold. She would not be a prisoner of Troy any more, and neither could Agamemnon use her death to call on the Greeks to avenge her. The war would have to stop.

She swung her legs off the sill and felt the smooth floor beneath her bare feet. Pulling herself up by the curtain she walked unsteadily to the chest at the foot of her bed, where she found her black travel cloak folded ready. She had always known, from the moment Paris had died in her arms, that this would be her fate – to return to Menelaus and end the war. And yet it had taken the realisation that Priam and his remaining sons were determined not to give her up to force her into action. The very thought of facing Menelaus again after so long filled her with fear and revulsion, but she could not put off her doom any longer. She pulled on her sandals, threw the cloak about her shoulders and crossed to the door.

Outside her bedroom the corridor was dark and quiet. She followed it to the left, unsteady on her feet as she took the stairs down to the lower level of the palace, the leather soles of her sandals scuffing softly over the worn steps. She wandered past several open doorways – mostly storerooms – then turned a corner into a high-ceilinged antechamber that led out to the starlit courtyard. A soldier guarded the arched doorway at the far end, where he was talking in hushed tones to a small and curvaceous slave girl, their faces lit by a torch that burned brightly in a bracket on the wall. They were too absorbed in each other to notice Helen, who slipped back into the obscurity of the shadows. The soldier had a hardened mien – all members of the royal guard were veterans of the battlefield – but he was not so tough that he could resist the bold flirting of his pretty companion, who was leaning towards him so that his eyes could not fail to miss her deep cleavage. Taking the bait, he placed a large hand on her hip and slowly slid it up to her left breast. She angled her face towards his, but before their lips could meet a gaggle of voices in the courtyard forced them to back away from each other. Helen saw torches and the glint of armour in the darkness and ran back to the last doorway she had passed, nudging the door open and slipping inside. It smelled strongly of hay and she realised it was one of the fodder rooms for the nearby stables.

A clamour of voices and the rattle of bronze filled the antechamber. Something in the urgency of the rapidly approaching footsteps told her the soldiers had come with orders to take her to the great hall, where her fate was to be announced by Priam. Leaving the door slightly ajar, she waited until they had moved down the corridor – there were four of them, all fully armoured as if she might pose some threat – then slipped out and returned to the antechamber. The sentry and the servant girl had resumed their earlier closeness, but this time she did not care whether they saw her depart: her absence was about to be discovered anyway, and if she was to leave Troy she had to act at once. She pulled her hood up and walked to the door, forcing the would-be lovers to move apart again. The flicker of annoyance on their faces quickly disappeared as they recognised her, but she cared nothing for the guard’s admiring eyes or the jealousy in the girl’s features as they bowed their heads before her.

The air outside was cold and stank of horses. She almost ran across the courtyard, her cloak billowing out behind her and revealing her thin dress and bare limbs to the soldiers at the top of the ramp. They stood aside as she approached, allowing her to run down to the second tier of the citadel without challenge, although she could still hear their voices discussing her as she disappeared down a narrow side street beside the temple of Athena.

In ten years of living in the city, she only knew of one way out that did not involve gates or guards. It was not easy and it was not pleasant, but it was her only choice and she was glad that the wine had given her a bravado she would not otherwise have possessed. A couple more alleyways and side streets led her to the west-facing wall of Pergamos, where broad steps led to the parapet above. Helen froze and fell back into the shadows. Two cloaked soldiers were standing at the top, their helmets gleaming silver-like in the starlight and their horsehair plumes trailing out in the wind. Fortunately their faces were fixed on the plain beyond the walls and they did not notice Helen in the darkness behind them. After a few moments, they turned and ambled northwards with their spears over their shoulders. Aware her absence would have been discovered by now, Helen sprang up the stairs, only to stumble on the top step and cry out in pain as she cut her shin. She crouched down, biting her lip and holding the wound as she looked tensely to the north-east, but the guards did not return.

She limped to the ramparts and the one place where she could escape the city without being discovered. The stench from the latrine was almost overwhelming, but she wrapped a corner of her cloak over her mouth and forced herself forward. It was little more than an alcove with a hole in the floor that opened out over the walls. There were similar openings all along the circuit of the battlements, but only here was the long drop shortened by a flat outcrop of rock a short way down. The rock also caught most of the waste from the soldiers that used the latrine and ensured that the reek at this point of the walls was particularly close and strong. Helen looked down the hole and felt her stomach turn. It was wide enough for her to pass through, but now that she saw the dark mess against the grey rock below her resolve disappeared and she was forced to step back a few paces.

A little way to the north was the Simöeis. She would be able to wash away the filth there, but even if she could stomach escaping through the latrine and make it undetected to the river, she would have wet clothes for the whole of the long, circuitous journey to the Greek camp. Why had she not thought of that before? Her ridiculous plan had been poorly thought out and now seemed utterly impossible. But she knew she had to go through with it, however disgusting and gruelling it would be. There was no other way to end the war and prevent further misery and suffering being inflicted on the people of Troy, the people for whom Paris had sacrificed his life. She wound the cloak more tightly about her body and stepped up to the gaping, malodorous hole in the floor.

‘What are you doing up here?’ demanded a stern voice.

Helen spun round to see the tall figure of a man at the top of the stairs. The starlight glittered on his polished armour and there was a naked sword in his hand. For a moment she was filled with fear. Then she recognised Apheidas’s handsome, battle-hardened face and her fear turned to anger.