Yes, yes, he thinks, all this I know is unprecedented.
But so is his plan. This plunging at near dawn down a deserted corridor is just the beginning. He will get used to the unaccustomed. It is what he is after.
He feels bold now, defiant. Sure of his decision.
If he is to face Hecuba and prevail, he has to be.
He finds her already risen and sitting, very erect, on the day bed in her sitting room. A cruse lamp is burning at the top of a tall copper stand. At her feet a pot of embers — she suffers from the cold — throws out a feeble warmth.
She too has not slept. Her hair is awry — that is what he sees first. But as soon as she catches sight of him, with her old pride in her beauty, and the wish as always to appear at her best before him, her hand, in a gesture that like everything she does is precise, controlled, with its own practical elegance, goes to the bodkin that holds it, and in a moment all is restored.
He watches, says nothing. Moved again by the tenderness they have so long shared, he seats himself beside her and takes her hand. It is no longer white now but veined and mottled like his own with liver-coloured spots, the flesh between the fine bones, which his fingertips gently feel for, puckered and slack. He raises it to his lips, and she casts a piteous look upon him. Her eyelids are swollen with tears.
‘Hecuba. My dear,’ he whispers, and she allows herself, almost girlishly, to be held and comforted.
They sit a moment, holding one another like children. The lamp flickers. She weeps. When her tears have come to an end, and she has once again taken control of herself, he begins.
‘My dear,’ he says softly, ‘it is eleven days now since Hector’s death and we have done nothing, all of us, but weep and sit stunned with grief. I know I have wept, and I see from this that you are still full of tears. And how could we do less, any one of us, for such a son and brother, such a fearless protector of Troy and its people? And you most of all, my dear, who have lost so many sons in these last terrible years.’
He has much to tell her and wants to lead up to it slowly. He wants her to see the plan he is about to lay before her not as something desperate and wild but as the result on his part — though it is not, of course — of consideration and careful thought.
But the look she casts upon him is so fierce that he draws back and cannot go on. He feels the hard purpose he has come with flutter in him and fail.
‘Tears,’ she mutters, almost to herself. ‘Oh, I have plenty of those. But not of grief. Of anger, fury, that I am a woman and can do nothing but sit here and rage and weep while the body of my son Hector, after eleven days and nights, is still out there on the plain, unwashed, unanointed, and eleven times now their noble Achilles has dragged him up and down before the Greek ships — my son, my dear son Hector! — and tumbled his poor head in the dirt. Oh, if I could get my hands on that butcher I’d tear his heart out and eat it raw!’
Priam quails before this small, fierce, straight-backed woman he has known and not known for so many years.
‘I carried him,’ she whispers, ‘here, here,’ and her clenched fist beats at the hollow under her heart. ‘It is my flesh that is being tumbled on the stones out there. Seven times now I’ve grieved for a son lost in this war. And what I remember of each one is how they kicked their little heels under my heart — here, just here — and the first cry they gave when I yielded them up to the world, and the first steps they took. Troilus was very late in walking — do you recall that, Priam? You used to tempt him with a little dagger you had, with a dog’s head on the handle — do you recall that?’ — and she searches his face for a response. ‘I was in labour for eighteen hours with Hector. That is what I recall when I think of his body being tumbled over the stones and left out there for dogs to tear at and maul.’
Priam shakes his head. This kind of women’s talk unnerves him. It is not in his sphere. He remembers nothing of a dagger carved like a dog, or that his son Troilus had been slow to walk. What he recalls is a series of small squalling bundles, each one presented to him like a bloodied human offering on the outstretched palms of an attendant. To be recognised as his, and blessed and gathered into his household. What he recalls is that Troilus is dead, like so many of his sons. Like Hector. This talk of dogs’ heads and daggers has diverted him from what he has come to tell her and makes it difficult for him to begin. But after a moment of quiet restraint he does so.
‘Hecuba,’ he ventures. ‘After all this time, these eleven days of doing nothing but weep and think and think again, I have come to a decision — no, no, let me finish, you can make your objections, I know you will have objections, afterwards, when I’ve had my say.
‘I am too old, I know, to put on armour and go to the field. To ride into the fray and leap down from my chariot and crack heads, and sweat and get bloody. And the truth is I never was a warrior, it was not my role. My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist — my breath too when talk was needed, because outside my life here in the court and with you, my dear, where I do like to speak a little, I have always had a herald at my side, our good Idaeus, to find words for me. To be seen as a man like other men — human as we are, all of us — would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent, so that when old age came upon me, as it has at last, the world would not see how shaky my grip has become, and how cracked and thin my voice. Only that I am still here. Fixed and permanent. Unchangeable, therefore unchanged. Well, you know I am changed, my dear, because from you nothing of what I am, or almost nothing, is hidden. To others I am what I have always been — great Priam. But only because they have never really looked at me. And when they do look, what they see is what they are meant to see. The fixed mark to which everything else in my kingdom refers. A ceremonial figurehead that might just as well be of stone or wood. So — to come at last to what I want to tell you.
‘This morning, as I was sitting quietly on my couch just after waking, a vision came to me. Not quite a dream,’ and taking a good breath he begins to paint for Hecuba how he had seen himself seated in a wagon drawn by two black mules, plainly dressed in a white robe and with none of the signs of kingship upon him, no amulet, no armband or any other sort of regalia; and just recalling it now, allowing the lines of the picture to grow clear as he adds one detail then the next, makes him more certain than ever that what he intends to do is what he must do.
But to Hecuba the image is a shocking one — she is more tied to convention than she believes — and as Priam warms to his subject she grows more and more disturbed.
What Priam is speaking of is a dream. Dreams are subtle, shifting, they are meant to be read, not taken literally. Hidden away in what they appear to present are signs that must be seized on by a mind that can see past mere actualities to what hovers luminously beyond. She has spent all the years of their marriage dealing with these visions that afflict him. She prepares now to reply as she normally would, but Priam prevents her.
‘No, no, my dear,’ he insists, ‘I am not finished,’ and the firmness of this, which is unusual, makes her pause. He goes on quickly to describe the driver who sits beside him on the bench, the wicker — work canopy over the bed of the wagon, the load they are carrying.
‘It shines out,’ he whispers, his voice touched with wonder as if the wagon were actually there in the room with them, ‘from under a plain white coverlet. And though I cannot see it —’ he blinks, he is very aware of her stopped breath — ‘though I cannot see it, I know what it is. It is the better part of my treasury. Gold coins, armour and arms, plate, tripods, cauldrons, the rare gold cup — my favourite, you know the one, that the Thracians gave me all those years ago when I went on an embassy to them — all shining out as I sit on the bench beside the driver and we travel on under the night.