‘Not for anything?’
She stood and unfastened the brooch at her shoulder. The chiton slipped down to her feet and she stepped free of it, brushing it aside with her toes. Odysseus swallowed and raised himself onto his elbows, transfixed by the sight of Helen’s naked body. Her oiled skin was a matchless white, broken only by the pink ovals of her nipples and the black triangle of her pubic hair. Then, before he could even think to force his gaze away, she crouched down and slid into the bath. For an agonising moment her nakedness was lost below the water, then she moved towards him and pressed her body against his.
‘I’ll give myself to you, Odysseus,’ she whispered, her face so close he could smell the wine on her breath. ‘Promise to take me away from here and I’ll be yours, right now. Deiphobus is at a feast to honour the visit of King Anchises, Aeneas’s father, from Dardanus; we won’t be disturbed.’
‘No,’ he said, turning his face away.
Helen kissed his cheek and slid her fingers into his hair. The soft weight of her chest pressed down on his and he wavered, looking into her eyes and seeing the promise that was in them. The blood was in her lips and cheeks and he could feel the hardness of her nipples, craving for his touch. The wine in her veins and the grief in her heart had filled her with a reckless desire that cared nothing for what might happen if they were discovered. And her passion was infectious, spreading through the heat of her naked skin into Odysseus so that his arms slipped around her and trapped her body against his. He had not felt the touch of a woman since leaving Ithaca; now, suddenly, the long years of loneliness and need rose up like a great wave that threatened to sweep him away. But as his eyes looked into hers another instinct – deeper than his lust – told him the woman in his arms was not his woman. He seized her by the waist and pushed her away.
‘No!’ he repeated, more firmly this time. ‘I will not betray Penelope.’
‘Don’t be a fool!’ she replied hotly, rising to her feet so that the water streamed from her shoulders and breasts. ‘You want me, I can feel it. And I want you!’
‘You don’t want me, Helen. All you want is for someone to make love to you and help you forget your own misery.’
‘And what of it? Don’t you have the same need? You haven’t seen Penelope in ten years – and surely you haven’t been faithful to her in all that time? Even if you have, what does it matter anyway? Take me now, Odysseus, while you still have the chance – or deny your instincts and continue in the vain, pathetic hope you might one day be reunited with your wife! Can you risk more years without a lover’s touch – a touch that for all your faithfulness you might never know again?’
Odysseus thought of the oracle he had been given under Mount Parnassus, which had solemnly announced that if he went to Troy he would not see his home again for twenty years. One decade had already passed; could he bear to wait another? And then he remembered the old oracles that had said the war would end in the tenth year, and the new ones that promised Troy would fall if the Palladium could be stolen from the city. No, he insisted to himself, he would bring the war to a finish and sail back to his wife – and the pleasure of a few moments would not mar that homecoming for him. He pulled himself up onto the edge of the bath.
‘I’m sorry, Helen. You’re not in your right mind, and even if you were I could never become your lover. Nor can I help you escape from Troy – with or without Pleisthenes.’
Her eyes were ablaze now.
‘If you refuse to help me get out then I’ll make sure you share my imprisonment. All it would take is a single scream.’
Odysseus swung his legs out of the water and stood. A stack of folded towels waited on a nearby stool; he took one and began drying himself.
‘Then call the guard.’
She glared at him from the bath, provoked to rage by his rejection and tempted to accept his challenge. Then she lowered her face into her hands and sobbed. Odysseus stopped rubbing his hair and looked on helplessly for a moment, before throwing the towel about his waist and kneeling at the water’s edge.
‘Here,’ he said, offering her his hand.
‘I have to be free of these walls, Odysseus,’ she replied, keeping her face in her hands. ‘I don’t care if Agamemnon and Priam want to keep on fighting. I just want to get out, get away; be anywhere but here.’
He took her hands in his and slowly drew them back. The unconquerable walls of Helen’s beauty had fallen to expose the red eyes and damp cheeks of a broken human being – the same frightened young girl he had occasionally glimpsed in the great hall at Sparta, during the feasts held in her honour so many years before.
‘I can’t take you with me,’ he said, ‘but I can give you hope. The end of the war is in sight. There’s a new oracle that says Troy will fall this year if the Palladium can be taken from the temple of Athena. Diomedes is by the banks of the Simöeis, waiting for me to lower a rope to him. Together we will fulfil the oracle and seal Troy’s doom, and if you want an end to your imprisonment, Helen, then you have to help us.’
She looked at him and smiled, the power of her beauty returning like the light of the sun that has been briefly concealed behind a cloud.
‘I’ll help,’ she said with a sniff. ‘I can take you to the place where the walls are easiest to climb. There are still guards, but I can distract them while you signal to Diomedes. Even then you’ll be hard pressed to enter the temple and escape with the Palladium alive.’
‘It’s a risk we’ll have to take.’
Helen moved to the edge of the bath and Odysseus helped her out. She quickly covered her nakedness with one of the towels, then turned to him with a strange expression on her face.
‘There are other ways I can help you,’ she said. ‘My sister, Clytaemnestra, taught me how to make sleeping draughts when we were children. It’s a skill I’ve found use for here in Troy – to sooth Paris when he struggled to sleep, and also for Deiphobus on the nights when I can’t bear his touch. I can have my maids take a skin of wine for the guards at the temple, if you wish.’ She met Odysseus’s grin with a smile of her own. ‘And there’s something else – someone who can help you if you’re forced to fight your way out.’
‘Who?’
‘A captured Greek – a nobleman, from the rumours my maids have heard. It’s curious, and I don’t know whether it’s true, but they say he’s being held in Apheidas’s own house rather than the usual rooms in the barracks, so it’ll be much easier to get him out – ’
‘Eperitus!’ Odysseus exclaimed, suddenly filled with excitement. ‘It’s Eperitus! By all the gods, I knew he wasn’t dead. Fetch me some clothes, Helen – I have to get to Apheidas’s house now.’
Helen reached across and took his hand.
‘Diomedes first,’ she said, then turned and called for her maids.
Chapter Thirty
UNEXPECTED HELP
The streets of Pergamos were cloaked in thick darkness as Helen led Odysseus towards the battlements. The flames of their torch left an orange glow on the walls of the buildings they passed, but at that time of night there was no-one to see them as they slipped out of a servants’ side entrance and between the narrow thoroughfares of the citadel. The greatest danger was from the guards patrolling the parapet, but Helen had sent two of her maids to keep them distracted while she and Odysseus signalled to Diomedes.
‘Any Greek soldier who deserted his duties for the sake of a woman would be flogged,’ Odysseus commented as they waited in the shadows of a house, looking up at the ramparts. ‘I don’t expect it’s any different for Trojans.’
Helen raised a dismissive eyebrow at him before returning her gaze to the stone steps that led up to the walls.