The Silence of the Girls

I was worried about my mother-in-law, who’d chosen to stay behind in the palace rather than be carried to the citadel on a litter—worried, and exasperated with myself for being worried, for if our situations had been reversed she would certainly not have cared about me. She’d been ill for a year with a disease that swelled her belly and stripped the flesh from her bones. Finally, I decided I had to go to her, at least check she had enough water and food. Ritsa would have gone with me—she was already on her feet—but I shook my head. “I won’t be gone a minute,” I said.

Outside, I took a deep breath. Even at that moment, with the world about to explode and cascade down around my ears, I felt the relief of breathing untainted air. Dusty and hot—it scorched the back of my throat—but still smelling fresh after the foetid atmosphere of the upstairs room. The quickest route to the palace was straight across the main square, but I could see arrows scattered in the dust and even as I watched one soared over the walls and stuck, quivering, in a pile of dirt. No, better not risk it. I ran down a side street so narrow the houses towering over me let in scarcely any light. Reaching the palace walls, I entered through a side gate that must have been left unlocked when the servants fled. Horses whickered from the stables on my right. I crossed the courtyard and ran quickly along a passage that led into the main hall.

It seemed strange to me, the huge, lofty room with Mynes’s throne at the far end. I’d first entered this room on my marriage day, carried from my father’s house on a litter, after dark, surrounded by men holding blazing torches. Mynes, with his mother, Queen Maire, by his side, had been waiting to greet me. His father had died the year before, he had no brothers and it was vital for him to get an heir. So he was being married, far younger than men expect to marry, though no doubt he’d already worked his way round the palace women and thrown in a few stable lads for relish along the way. What a disappointment I must have been when, finally, I climbed down from the litter and stood, trembling, as the maids removed my mantle and veils: a skinny little thing, all hair and eyes and scarcely a curve in sight. Poor Mynes. His idea of female beauty was a woman so fat if you slapped her backside in the morning she’d still be jiggling when you got back home for dinner. But he did his best, every night for months, toiling between my less-than-voluptuous thighs as willingly as a carthorse in the shafts, but when no pregnancy resulted he quickly became bored and reverted to his first love: a woman who worked in the kitchens and who, with a slave’s subtle mixture of fondness and aggression, had taken him into her bed when he was only twelve years old.

Even on that first day, I looked at Queen Maire and knew I had a fight on my hands. Only it was not just one fight, it was a whole bloody war. By the time I was eighteen I was the veteran of many long and bitter campaigns. Mynes seemed entirely unaware of the tension, but then in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women. They’re the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don’t seem to see our battles—or they prefer not to. Perhaps if they realized we’re not the gentle creatures they take us for their own peace of mind would be disturbed?

If I’d had a baby—a son—everything would have changed, but at the end of a year I was still wearing my girdle defiantly tight until at last Maire, made desperate by her longing for a grandchild, pointed at my slim waist and openly jeered. I don’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t become ill. She’d already selected a concubine from one of the ruling families; a girl who, although not lawfully married, would have become queen in all but name. But then, Maire’s own belly began to grow. She was still just young enough for there to be ripples of scandal. Whose is it? everybody was asking. She never left the palace except to pray at her husband’s tomb! But then she began to turn yellow and lose weight and kept to her own rooms most of the time. Without her to drive them, the negotiations over the sixteen-year-old concubine faltered and died. This was my opportunity, the first I’d had, and I seized it. Soon, all the palace officials who’d been loyal to her were answering to me. And the palace was no worse run than it had been when she was in power. More efficiently, if anything.

I stood in the centre of the hall, remembering these things and the palace that was normally so full of noise—voices, clattering pans, running feet—stretched out all around me as quiet as a tomb. Oh, I could still hear the clash of battle from outside the city walls but, rather like the intermittent humming of a bee on a summer’s evening, the sound seemed merely to intensify the silence.

I’d have liked to stay there in the hall or, even better, go out into the inner courtyard and sit under my favourite tree, but I knew Ritsa would be worrying about me and so I went slowly up the stairs and along the main corridor to my mother-in-law’s room. The door creaked as I opened it. The room was in semi-darkness; Maire kept the blinds closed, whether because the light hurt her eyes or because she wished to hide her changed appearance from the world, I didn’t know. She had been a very beautiful woman—and I’d noticed a few weeks before that the precious bronze mirror that had formed part of her dowry was nowhere to be seen.

A movement on the bed. A pale face turned towards me in the gloom.

“Who is it?”

“Briseis.”

Immediately, the face turned away. That wasn’t the name she’d been hoping for. She’d become rather fond of Ismene, who was supposed to be carrying Mynes’s baby—and probably was, though given the lives slaves lead it’s not always possible to know who a child’s father is. But in these last few desperate weeks and months that child had become Maire’s hope. Yes, Ismene was a slave, but slaves can be freed, and if the child were to be a boy…

I went further into the room. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes.” Not thinking about it, just wanting me to go.

“Enough water?”

She glanced at her bedside table. I went round the bed and picked up the jug, which was almost full. I poured her a large cup then went to refill the jug from a bowl of water in the corner furthest from the door. Warm, stale water with a film of dust on the top. I plunged the jug deep and took it across to the bed. Four sharp slits of light lay across the red-and-purple rug beneath my feet, bright enough to hurt my eyes, though the bed was in near-darkness.

She was struggling to sit up. I held the cup to her lips and she drank greedily, her wasted throat jerking with every gulp. After a while, she raised her head and I thought she’d had enough, but she made a little mew of protest when I tried to take the cup away. When at last she’d finished, she wiped her mouth delicately on a corner of her veil. I could feel her resenting me because I’d witnessed her thirst, her helplessness.

I straightened the pillows behind her head. As she bent forward her spine was shockingly visible under the pallid skin. You lift spines like that out of cooked fish. I lowered her gently onto the pillows and she let out a sigh of contentment. I smoothed the sheets, every fold of linen releasing smells of old age, illness…Urine too. I was angry. I’d hated this woman so fiercely for so long—and not without cause. I’d come into her house as a fourteen-year-old girl, a girl with no mother to guide her. She could’ve been kind to me and she wasn’t; she could’ve helped me find my feet and she didn’t. I had no reason to love her, but what made me angry at that moment was that in allowing herself to dwindle until she was nothing more than a heap of creased flesh and jutting bone, she’d left me with so very little to hate. Yes, I’d won, but it was a hollow victory—and not just because Achilles was hammering on the gate.

“There is something you could do for me.” Her voice was high, clear and cold. “You see that chest?”

I could, though only just. An oblong of heavy, carved oak, squatting on its own shadow at the foot of the bed.

“I need you to get something.”

Raising the heavy lid, I released a fusty smell of feathers and stale herbs. “What am I looking for?”

“There’s a knife. No, not on the top—underneath…Can you see it?”

I turned to look at her. She stared straight back at me, not blinking, not lowering her gaze.

The knife was tucked in between the third and fourth layer of bedclothes. I drew it from its sheath and the sharp blade winked wickedly up at me. This was far from being the small, ornamental knife I’d been expecting to find, the kind rich women use to cut their meat. It was the length of a man’s ceremonial dagger and must surely have belonged to her husband. I carried it across to her and placed it in her hands. She looked down at it, fingering the encrusted jewels on the hilt. I wondered for a moment if she was going to ask me to kill her and how I would feel if she did, but no, she sighed and set the knife to one side.

Easing herself a little higher in the bed, she said, “Have you heard anything? Do you know what’s happening?”

“No. I know they’re close to the gates.” I could pity her then, an old woman—because illness had made her old—dreading to be told her son was dead. “If I do hear anything, of course I’ll let you know…”

She nodded, dismissing me. When I got to the door I paused with my hand on the latch and looked back, but she’d already turned away.

2

Ritsa was bathing a sick child when I got back. I had to step over several sleeping bodies to get to her.

She turned as my shadow fell across her. “How is she?”

“Not good. She won’t last.”

“Probably just as well.”

I caught her looking at me curiously. The feud between my mother-in-law and me was well known. I said, rather defensively, perhaps, “She could’ve come with us. We could’ve carried her. She didn’t want to.”

The child whimpered and Ritsa brushed the hair back from his damp forehead. His mother was sitting only a few feet away, struggling with a fretful baby who wanted to suckle but was fighting the breast. She looked worn out. I wondered whether facing the future was harder if you were responsible for other lives. I had only my own burden to bear and, looking at that exhausted mother, I felt the freedom of that—and the loneliness. And then I thought that there were different ways of being connected to other people. Yes, I was childless—but I felt responsible for every woman and child in that room, not to mention the slaves crammed together in the basement.

As the heat intensified, most of the women settled down and tried to sleep. A few succeeded—for a time there was a rising chorus of snores and whistling breaths—but most just lay there staring listlessly at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and kept them closed while pulses throbbed in my temples and under my jaw. Then Achilles’s war cry came again, so close this time some of the women sat up and gazed fearfully around them. We all knew we were approaching the end.

An hour later, hearing the crash and splinter of wood breaking, I ran up onto the roof, leant over the parapet and saw Greek fighters spilling through a breach in the gates. Directly below me, a knot of writhing arms and shoulders advanced and then retreated as our men struggled to push the invaders back. No use, they were pouring through the breach, slashing and stabbing as they came. Soon, that peaceful square where the farmers held their weekend market was trampled red with blood. Now and then, for no apparent reason, a gap would open in the struggling ranks and in one of those momentary clearings I saw Achilles raise his plumed head and look towards the palace steps where my husband stood with two of my brothers by his side. The next thing I saw was Achilles hacking his way towards them. As he reached the steps, the guards came running down to bar his way. I saw him thrust his sword upwards into the pit of a man’s belly. Blood and urine spurted out, but the dying man, his face wiped clean of pain, cradled his spilling intestines as gently as a mother nurses her newborn child. I saw men’s mouths open like scarlet flowers but I couldn’t hear their screams. The noise of the battle kept coming and going, one minute deafening, the next muffled. I was gripping the parapet so hard my nails splintered on the rough stone. There were moments when I swear time stopped. My youngest brother—fourteen years old, barely able to lift my father’s sword—I saw him die. I saw the flash of the upraised spear, I saw my brother lying on the ground wriggling like a stuck pig. And at that moment Achilles, as if he had all the time in the world, turned his head and glanced up at the tower. He was looking straight at me, or so it seemed—I think I actually took a step back—but the sun was in his eyes, he couldn’t possibly have seen me. Then, with a kind of fastidious precision—I wish I could forget it, but I can’t—he put his foot on my brother’s neck and pulled the spear out. Blood spurted from the wound, my brother struggled for a full minute to go on breathing, and then lay still. I saw my father’s sword drop from his loosening grip.

Achilles had already moved on, to the next man, and the next. He killed sixty men that day.

The fiercest fighting was on the palace steps where my husband, poor, silly Mynes, fought bravely to defend his city—he who, until that day, had been a weak, boorish, vacillating boy. He died with both hands gripping Achilles’s spear, as if he thought it belonged to him and Achilles was trying to take it away. Mynes looked utterly astonished. My two older brothers died beside him. I don’t know how my third-oldest brother died, but somehow or other, whether by the gates or on the palace steps, he met his end. For the first and only time in my life, I was glad my mother was dead.

Every man in the city died that day, fighting at the gates or on the palace steps. Those who were too old to fight were dragged out of their houses and butchered in the street. I saw Achilles, blood-red from his plumed helmet to his sandalled feet, throw his arm across the shoulders of another young man, laughing in triumph. His spear, trailing behind him, cut a line through the red earth.

It was over in a matter of hours. By the time the shadows lengthened across the square, the palace steps were piled high with corpses, though the Greeks were busy for an hour after that, chasing stragglers, searching houses and gardens where the wounded might have tried to hide. When there were no men left to kill, the looting began. Men like columns of red ants passed goods from hand to hand, heaping them up close to the gates ready to carry them down to the ships. When they ran out of space they dragged the corpses to one side of the marketplace, stacking them against the walls of the citadel. Dogs drooling ropes of slobber began sniffing around the dead, their lean, angular, black shadows knife-edged on the white stone. Crows came flying in, squabbling as they settled on roofs and walls, lining every door and window frame like black snow. Noisy, to begin with, then quiet. Waiting.

The looting was better organized now. Gangs of men were dragging heavy loads out of the buildings—carved furniture, bales of rich cloth, tapestries, armour, tripods, cooking cauldrons, barrels of wine and grain. Now and then, the men would sit down and rest, some on the ground, some on the chairs and beds they’d been carrying. They were all swigging wine straight from the jug, wiping their mouths on the backs of their bloodstained hands, getting steadily and determinedly drunk. And more and more often, as the sky started to fade, they gazed up at the slit windows of the citadel where they knew the women would be hiding. The captains went from group to group, urging the men onto their feet again, and gradually they succeeded. A few final swigs and they were back at work.

For hours, I watched them strip houses and temples of wealth that generations of my people had worked hard to create, and they were so good at it, so practised. It was exactly like seeing a swarm of locusts settle onto a harvest field; you know they’re not going to leave even one ear of corn behind. I watched helplessly as the palace—my home—was stripped bare. By now many of the other women had joined me on the roof, but we were all too gripped by grief and fear to talk to each other. Gradually, the looting stopped—there was nothing left to take—and the drinking began in earnest. Several huge vats were wheeled into the square and jugs passed from man to man…

And then they turned their attention to us.

The slave women in the basement were dragged out first. Still watching from the roof, I saw a woman raped repeatedly by a gang of men who were sharing a wine jug, passing it good-naturedly from hand to hand while waiting their turn. Her two sons—twelve, thirteen years old perhaps—lay wounded and dying a few yards away from her, though those few yards might as well have been a mile: she had no hope of reaching them. She kept stretching out her hands and calling their names as first one and then the other died. I turned away; I couldn’t bear to go on watching.

By now, all the women had come up to the roof and were huddled together, young girls in particular clinging to their mothers. We could hear laughter as the Greeks crowded up the stairs. Arianna, my cousin on my mother’s side, grasped my arm, saying without words: Come. And then she climbed onto the parapet and, at the exact moment they burst onto the roof, threw herself down, her white robe fluttering round her as she fell—like a singed moth. It seemed to be a long time before she hit the ground, though it could only have been seconds. Her cry faded to a stricken silence, in which, slowly, stepping out in front of the other women, I turned to face the men. They stared at me, awkward now, uneasy, like puppies who aren’t sure what to do with the rabbit they’ve caught in their jaws.

Then a white-haired man walked forward and introduced himself as Nestor, King of Pylos. He bowed courteously and I thought that, probably for the last time in my life, somebody was looking at me and seeing Briseis, the queen.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

I just wanted to laugh. The boys who’d been pretending to defend the staircase had already been dragged away. Another boy, a year or two older, but backward for his age, clung to his mother’s skirt until one of the fighters bent down and prized his pudgy fingers loose. We heard him screaming “Mummy, Mummy!” all the way down the stairs. Then silence.

Keeping my face carefully expressionless, I looked at Nestor and thought: I will hate you till my last breath.

After that, it’s a blur. A few things stand out, still cut like daggers. We were led away, through the narrow side streets of our city, herded along by men with torches. Our jumbled shadows leapt up the white walls ahead of us and fell away behind. Once, we passed a walled garden and the scent of mimosa drifted towards us on the warm night air. Later, when so many other memories have vanished, I still get flashes of that smell, tugging at my heartstrings, reminding me of everything I lost. Then it was gone—and we were holding on to each other again, slipping and slithering along alleys cobbled with our brothers.

And so on to the beach, the sea dark and heaving, breaking curd-white against the black bows of their ships. We were pushed on board, urged up ladders by men wielding the butt ends of their spears and then made to stand crowded together on the decks—the holds being full of more perishable cargo. We took a last look at the city. Most of the houses and temples were ablaze. Flames had engulfed one wing of the palace. I only hoped my mother-in-law had somehow summoned up the strength to kill herself before the fire reached her.

With a great rattling of anchor chains the ships put out to sea. Once we’d left the shelter of the harbour, a treacherous wind filled the sails and carried us rapidly away from home. We crowded the sides, hungry for a last glimpse of Lyrnessus. Even in the short time we’d been on board, the fires had spread. I thought of the corpses piled high in the marketplace and hoped the flames would get to them before the dogs, but even as the thought formed I saw my brothers’ dismembered limbs being dragged from street to street. For a time, the dogs would snap and snarl at the black birds circling overhead and the big, ungainly vultures waiting. At intervals, the birds would all rise up into the air and then settle slowly, drifting down like scraps of burnt cloth, charred remnants of the great tapestries that had lined the palace walls. Soon the dogs would have gorged till they were sick and then they’d slink out of the city, away from the advancing fires, and the birds would get their turn.

A short voyage. We clung to each other for comfort on the tilting deck. Most of the women and nearly all the children were violently sick, as much from fear, I think, as from the motion of the waves. In no time at all, it seemed, the ship yawed and shuddered as she turned, against the tide, into the shelter of a huge bay.

Suddenly, men were shouting and throwing ropes—one rope snaked across the deck and hit my feet—or jumping down into the sea and wading, waist-deep, through foam-tipped waves onto the shore. Still we held on to each other, wet and shaking with cold now because a wave had broken over the bow as the ship veered round, all of us terrified of what was going to happen next. They drove the ship hard onto the shingle, and other men, scores of them, splashed into the sea to help haul her above the tideline. Then, one by one, we were lowered to the ground. I looked along the curve of the bay and saw hundreds of black, beaked, predatory ships, more than I’d ever seen in my life. More than I could ever have imagined. Once everybody was on dry land, we were driven up the beach and across a wide-open space towards a row of huts. I was walking beside a young girl, dark-haired and very pretty—or she would’ve been if her face hadn’t been blubbery with tears. I grabbed her bare arm and pinched it. Startled, she turned to look at me, and I said: “Don’t cry.” She gaped at me so I pinched her again, harder. “Don’t cry.”