“She knows,” said Andromache. Hector’s wife sounded tired, as if she had been awake all night. “She knows about Astyanax.”
“How?”
It was Cassandra who replied, without lifting her head. “I saw it in one of my trances.”
Helen sighed. There had been seven of them at the height of their conspiracy—Andromache, Hector’s wife, and her mother-in-law, Hecuba, Priam’s queen, had begun the planning. Then Theano had joined the group—the horseman Antenor ‘s wife, but also high priestess in Athena’s temple. Then Hecuba’s daughter, Laodice, was brought into the secret circle. Those four had trusted Helen with their secret and their purpose—to end the war, to save their husbands’ lives, to save their children’s lives, to save themselves from enslavement by the Achaeans.
Helen had been honored to become one of the secret Trojan Women—no Trojan, she knew, but only the source of the true Trojan Women’s sorrows—and like Hecuba, Andromache, Theano, and Laodice, she had worked for years to find a third way—an end to the war with honor, but without such a terrible price.
They’d had no choice but to include Cassandra, Priam’s prettiest but maddest daughter, in their plotting. The young woman had been given the gift of second sight by Apollo, and they needed her visions if they were to plan and plot. Besides, Cassandra had already found them out in one of her mad trances—babbling already about the Trojan Women and their secret meetings in the vault beneath Athena’s temple—so they included her in order to silence her.
The seventh and final and oldest Trojan Woman was Herophile, “beloved of Hera,” the oldest and wisest sibyl and priestess of Apollo Smintheus. As a sibyl, Herophile often interpreted Cassandra’s wild dreams more accurately than Cassandra could.
So when Achilles had overthrown Agamemnon, the fleet-footed mankiller claiming that Pallas Athena herself had murdered his best friend, Patroclus, and then leading the Achaeans against the gods themselves in violent war, the Trojan Women had seen their chance. Excluding Cassandra from their planning—for the prophetess was too unstable in those final days before her prophesied fall of Troy—they had carried out the murder of Andromache’s nurse and that nurse’s child, Andromache then claiming—shouting, sobbing hysterically—that it had been Pallas Athena and the goddess Aphrodite who had slaughtered young Astyanax, Hector’s child.
Hector, like Achilles before him, had gone mad with grief and anger. The Trojan War ended. The War with the Gods began. The Achaeans and Trojans marched through the Hole to besiege Olympos with their new allies, the minor-gods, the moravecs.
And in that first day of bombing from the gods—before the moravecs protected Ilium with their forcefields—Hecuba had died. And her daughter Laodice. And Theano, Athena’s most beloved priestess.
Three of the seven Trojan Women dead that first day of the war they had brought about. Then hundreds of other warriors and civilians dear to them.
Now another? thought Helen, her heart sinking into some region of sorrow beneath sorrow. To Andromache, she asked, “Are you going to kill Cassandra?”
Hector’s wife turned her cold gaze in Helen’s direction. “No,” she said at last, “I’m going to show her Scamandrius, my Astyanax.”
Menelaus had no problem getting into the city in his clumsy disguise of boar-tusk helmet and lion-skin robe. He pushed in past the gate guards along with scores of other barbarians, Trojan allies all, after Paris’s funeral procession and just before the much-heralded arrival of the Amazon women.
It was still early. He avoided the area around Priam’s bombed-out palace since he knew that Hector and his captains would be there interring Paris’s bones and too many of those Trojan heroes could recognize the boar-tusk helmet or Diomedes’ lion skin. Wending his way past the bustling marketplace and through alleys, he came out by the small square in front of Paris’s palace—King Priam’s temporary quarters and still home to Helen. There were elite guards at the door, of course, and more on the walls and every terrace. Odysseus had once told him which set-back terrace was Helen’s, and Menelaus watched those billowing curtains with a terrible intensity, but his wife did not appear. There were two spearmen there in glinting bronze, which suggested that Helen was not at home this morning—she had never allowed bodyguards in her private apartments back in their more modest palace in Lacedaemon.
There was a wine and cheese shop across the square from Paris’s palace, rough tables set out into the sunny alley, and Menelaus broke his fast there, paying in the Trojan gold pieces he’d had the foresight to grab from Agamemnon’s trunk while he was dressing. He tarried there for hours—slipping more triangular coins to the shopkeeper to keep him happy during his tarrying—and listened to the gab and gossip from crowds in the square and townsfolk at adjoining benches.
“Is her ladyship in today?” one old crone asked another.
“Not since this morning. My Phoebe said that her chinks had gone and left at first light, yes, but not to honor her hubby’s bones bein’ put in all right and proper, no.”
“What then?” cackled the more toothless of the two old hags gumming their cheese. The old woman leaned closer as if ready to receive whispers, but the other old hag—as deaf as the first—fairly bellowed her response.
“Rumor has it that old priapic Priam insists that her Helenship—poxy foreign bitch that she is—marry his other son—not one of the army of Priam bastards roundabouts, you can’t throw a dog-puking rock without hitting a bastard of Priam’s, but that fat, stupid, rightful son, Deiphobus—and wed within forty-eight hours of Paris’s barbecue party.”
“Soon then.”
“Aye, soon. Today, perhaps. Deiphobus has been waiting his turn in line to boink the poxy doxy since the week Paris dragged her bumpy ass here—gods curse the day—so he’s probably well into the rites of Dionysos, if not of marriage, even as we speak, sister.”
The old hags cackled up bits of cheese and bread.
Menelaus slammed up from his table and strode the streets, carrying his spear in his left hand, his right hand on the hilt of his sword.
Deiphobus? Where does Deiphobus live?
It had been easier before the War with the Gods began. All of Priam’s unmarried sons and daughters—some in the fifties now—had lived in the huge palace in the center of the city—the Achaeans had carefully planned to carry the slaughter there first after breaching the Trojan walls—but that one lucky bomb on the first day of the new war had scattered the princes and their sisters to equally plush living quarters all over the huge city.
Thus, an hour after leaving the cheese shop, Menelaus was still striding the crowded streets when the Amazon Penthesilea and her dozen fighting women rode past while the crowds went wild.
Menelaus had to step back or be struck by the lead Amazon’s warhorse. Her greaved leg almost brushed his cloak. She never looked down or to the side.
Menelaus was struck so hard by Penthesilea’s beauty that he almost sat down then and there on the horse-dunged cobblestones. By Zeus, what frail beauty wrapped in such gorgeous, gleaming war armor! Those eyes! Menelaus—who’d never gone to war against or alongside the Amazon tribe—had never seen anything like it.
As if in a seer’s trance, he stumbled along behind the procession, following the crowds and the Amazons back to Paris’s palace. There the Amazon was greeted by Deiphobus, with no Helen in the retinue, so it seemed like the cheese hags had been wrong. At least about Helen’s current whereabouts.
Watching the door where Penthesilea had disappeared, Menelaus, like some lovestruck teenage shepherd boy, finally pulled himself away and began wandering the streets again. It was almost noon. He knew he had little time—Agamemnon had planned to start the uprising against Achilles’ rule by midday and have the battles fought by nightfall—and he recognized for the first time what a huge city Ilium was. What chance did he have of stumbling across Helen here in time to act? Almost none, he realized, since at first cry of battle amidst the Argive ranks, the great Scaean Gates would be closed and the guard on the walls doubled. Menelaus would be trapped.