‘True,’ said Agamemnon. He pulled on his beard. ‘So what will come of Troy’s trade embargo?’

‘War,’ said Odysseus peacefully. ‘Sooner or later there must be war. When we feel the pinch hard enough – when our merchants scream for justice in every throne room between Knossos and Iolkos – when we can no longer scrape up enough tin to bronze our copper and make swords and shields and arrowheads – then there will be war.’

Their talk grew duller still; well, it no longer concerned me. Besides, I was heartily sick of Menelaos. Wine was beginning to affect the gathering, fewer faces were turned up to me to worship. I slipped my feet out from under the table and stole away through the door behind my father’s chair. Down the passage which paralleled the dining hall, wishing I wore something more silent than my jangling skirt. The stair to the women’s wing was at the far end where the passage branched off to other public rooms; I reached it, ran up it without being called back. Now I had only to get past my mother’s apartments. Head bent, I pulled at the curtain.

Hands fastened upon my arms halted me, and my cry of alarm was muffled by a hand across my mouth. Diomedes! Heart pounding, I stared at him. Until this moment I had had no opportunity to be alone with him, nor conversed with him beyond salutations.

The lamplight gleamed upon his skin and polished it to amber, a cord beat very fast in the column of his throat; I let myself meet his dark, hot gaze, and felt his hand fall from my mouth. How beautiful he was! How much I loved beauty! But never in anything as much as I did in a man.

‘Meet me outside in the garden,’ he whispered.

I shook my head violently. ‘You must be mad! Let me go and I will not mention how I encountered you outside my mother’s rooms! Let me go!’

His teeth flashed white, he laughed silently. ‘I will not move from this spot until you promise to meet me in the garden. They’ll be in the dining hall for a long while yet – no one will miss either of us. Girl, I want you! I care nothing for their decisions or delays, I want you and I mean to have you.’

My head was still fogged from the heat of the dining hall; I put my hand to it. Then, apparently of its own volition, it nodded. Diomedes let me go at once. I fled to my rooms.

Neste was waiting to disrobe me.

‘Go to bed, old woman! I will undress myself.’

Used to my moods, she went gladly, leaving me to tug at my laces with trembling fingers, tear off my bodice and my blouse, struggle free from the skirt. I stripped off the bells, bracelets and rings, found my linen bathrobe and wrapped it about me. Then out into the corridor, down the back stairs into the night air. The garden, he had said: I found the rows of cabbages and edible roots, smiling. Who would look for us among the vegetables?

He was naked beneath a laurel tree. Off came my bathrobe, far enough from him to let him see me in the rain of moonlight. Then he was beside me, spreading it for our bed, holding me against himself flat on Mother Earth, from whom all women gather strength and all men lose it. Such is the way of the Gods.

‘Fingers and tongues, Diomedes,’ I whispered. ‘I will go to my marriage couch with hymen intact.’

He smothered his laughter between my breasts. ‘Did Theseus teach you how to be a virgin?’ he asked.

‘No one needed to teach me that,’ I said, stroking his arms and shoulders, sighing. ‘I am not very old, but I know that my head is the price of losing my maidenhead to any save my husband.’

By the time he left me he was, I think, satisfied, if not as he had anticipated. Because he loved me truly he honoured my conditions, just as Theseus had. Not that I was very concerned about how Diomedes felt. I was satisfied.

Which showed the next night when I sat beside my father’s throne, had there been any eyes to note it. Diomedes sat with Philoktetes and Odysseus in the throng, too far from me in the dimness to see how he looked. The room, bright with frescoes of dancing warriors and scarlet-painted columns, had sunk to dark and flickering shadows. The priests came, thick and cloying fumes of incense rose, and without fuss or fluster the atmosphere took on the solemn, burdensome holiness of a shrine.

I heard my father speak the words Odysseus had prepared; the oppression settled down like a living thing. Then came the sacrificial horse, a perfect white stallion with pink eyes and no hair of black on him, his hooves slipping on the well-worn flags, his head snaking back and forth in the golden halter. Agamemnon picked up the great double-headed axe and swung it expertly. The horse went down, it seemed, so very slowly, mane and tail floating like wisps of weed in water currents, his blood spurting.

While my father informed the company of the oath he required, I watched in sickened horror as the priests hacked the lovely beast into four quarters. Never shall I forget that scene: the suitors stepping forward one by one to balance their two feet on four limp pieces of warm flesh, swearing the terrible oath of loyalty and allegiance to my future husband. The voices were dulled and apathetic, for power and masculinity could not survive that awful moment. Pale and sweating faces waxed and waned in the torchlight as it wavered; from somewhere a wind was blowing, hallooing like a lost shade.

Finally it was done. The steaming carcass of the horse lay ignored, the suitors from their places looked up at King Tyndareus of Lakedaimon as if drugged.

‘I give my daughter to Menelaos,’ Father said.

There was a great sigh, nothing else. No one shouted a quick protest. Not even Diomedes leaped to his feet in anger. My eyes found his as the attendants went about kindling the lamps; we said our farewells across half a hundred heads, knowing we were beaten. I think the tears ran down my cheeks as I looked at him, but no one remarked on them. I gave my numbed hand into the damp clasp of Menelaos.

5

NARRATED BY

Paris

I returned to Troy on foot and alone, my bow and quiver across my shoulders. Seven moons I had spent among the forests and glades of Mount Ida, yet not one trophy did I have to show for them. Much as I loved hunting, I could never bear to see an animal stumble under the impact of an arrow; I preferred to see it as well and free as I was. My best hunting moments concerned more desirable quarry than deer or boar. For me the fun of the chase was in going after the human inhabitants of Ida’s woods, the wild girls and shepherdesses. When a girl sank down, defeated, no arrows pierced her save the one Eros shot; there was no stream of blood or dying moan, only a sigh of sweet content as I took her into my arms still gasping from the ecstasy of the chase, and ready to gasp with another kind of ecstasy.

I always spent my springs and summers on Ida; Court life bored me to the point of madness. How I hated those cedar rafters oiled and polished to richest brown, those painted stone halls and pillared towers! Being shut in behind huge walls was to suffocate, to be a prisoner. All I wanted was to run through leagues of grass and trees, lie exhausted with my face pillowed against a perfume of fallen leaves. But each autumn I had to return to Troy and spend the winter there with my father. That was my duty, token though it was. After all, I was his fourth son among many. Nobody took me seriously, and I preferred that.

I walked into the Throne Room at the end of an assembly on a wild, bleak day, still in my mountain clothes, ignoring the pitying smiles, the lips pursed up in disapproval. Dusk was already dimming to the gloom of night; the meeting had been a very long one.

My father the King sat upon his gold and ivory chair high upon a purple marble dais at the far end of the hall, his long white hair elaborately curled and his tremendous white beard twined about with thin strings of gold and silver. Inordinately proud of his old age, he was best pleased when he sat like an ancient god upon a tall pedestal, looking out over everything he owned.