The tears were falling; Priam wept an old man’s easy grief. ‘My heartfelt thanks to you and Sarpedon, dearest nephew.’

The others came forward, some as generous as Lykia, others haggling for money or privileges. Priam promised each what he wanted, and so the toll of men and aid grew. At the end of it I wondered how Agamemnon would ever manage to hold his ground. Two hundred thousand men would Priam marshal on the plain when the crocuses burst through the melting snow in the spring of next year. Unless my erstwhile brother-in-law had either reinforcements or tricks up his purple sleeve, he would be defeated. Why then did I continue to worry? Because I knew my people. Give a Greek enough rope and he’ll hang everyone else in sight. Never himself. I knew Agamemnon’s advisers of old, and I had lived in Troy long enough to understand that King Priam possessed no advisers to equal Nestor, Palamedes and Odysseus.

Oh, those meetings were boring! I attended them only because the rest of my life was even more boring. No one was permitted to sit except the King, and certainly not a woman. My feet hurt. So while a Paphlagonian clad in what looked like soft embroidered skins prated on in a dialect I couldn’t comprehend, my eyes wandered idly over the throng until they lit upon a man at the back who had apparently only just come in. Oh, nice! Very nice!

He pushed his way through the crowd easily, taller than any other man present save Hektor, who stood, as usual, beside the throne. The newcomer had all the haughtiness of a king – and one who held himself in high regard into the bargain. I was reminded irresistibly of Diomedes; he had the same graceful walk and hard, warrior air about him. Dark-haired and black-eyed, he was dressed richly; the cloak tossed carelessly back over his shoulders was lined with the most beautiful fur I had ever seen, long and fluffy and tawny-spotted. At the foot of the throne dais he bowed very slightly and stiffly, as a king does to one he has difficulty in admitting is his senior in rank.

‘Aineas!’ Priam said, a curious undertone in his voice. ‘I have looked for you these many days.’

‘You perceive me, sire,’ said the man called Aineas.

‘Have you seen the Greeks for yourself?’

‘Not yet, sire. I came in through the Dardanian Gate.’

His emphasis on the name of the gate was meaningful; I now remembered where I had heard his name. Aineas was Dardania’s Heir. His father, King Anchises, ruled the southern part of this land from a town called Lyrnessos. Priam always sneered when he spoke of Dardania, Anchises or Aineas; I gathered that in Troy all three were considered upstarts, though Paris had told me that King Anchises was Priam’s first cousin, that Dardanos had founded both the royal house in Troy and the royal house in Lyrnessos.

‘I suggest, then, that you go outside onto the balcony and look towards the Hellespont,’ said Priam, oozing sarcasm.

‘As you wish.’

Aineas disappeared for a very few moments, came back shrugging. ‘They look as if they mean to stay, don’t they?’

‘A perspicacious conclusion.’

Aineas ignored this sally. ‘Why did you summon me?’ he asked.

‘Surely it’s obvious? Once Agamemnon has his teeth firmly fixed in Troy, Dardania and Lyrnessos will be next. I want your troops to help crush the Greeks in the spring.’

‘Greece has no quarrel with Dardania.’

‘Greece doesn’t need excuses these days. Greece is after lands, bronze and gold.’

‘Well, sire, looking at the formidable array of allies here today, I can’t see that you’ll have need of the men of Dardania to help crush the Greeks. When your need is genuine, I’ll bring an army. But not in the spring.’

‘My need is genuine next spring!’

‘I doubt that.’

Priam struck the floor with his ivory sceptre; the emerald in its head gave out blue sparks. ‘I want your men!’

‘I can’t pledge anything without my father the King’s explicit permission, sire, and I have not got it.’

Beyond speech, Priam turned his head away.

As soon as we were alone, consumed with curiosity, I quizzed Paris about that strange argument.

‘What lies between your father and Prince Aineas?’

Paris tugged my hair lazily. ‘Rivalry.’

‘Rivalry? But one rules Dardania, the other Troy!’

‘Yes, but there’s an oracle which says that Aineas will rule Troy one day. My father fears the word of the God. Aineas knows the oracle too, so he always expects to be treated like the Heir. But when you consider that my father has fifty sons, Aineas’s attitude is quite ridiculous. My theory is that the oracle refers to another Aineas some time in the future.’

‘He seems a man,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘Very attractive.’

Liquid eyes gleamed at me. ‘Never forget whose wife you are, Helen. Stay away from Aineas.’

The feeling between me and Paris was waning. How could that have happened, when I had fallen in love with him at first glance? Yet it had, I suppose because I soon discovered that despite his passion for me, Paris couldn’t resist the urge to philander. Nor, in the summer, his urge to frolic in the vicinity of Mount Ida. In that one summer between my arrival in Troy and the advent of the Greeks, Paris disappeared for six full moons. When he finally returned, he didn’t even apologise! Nor could he be brought to see how I suffered in his absence.

Some of the Court women did everything they could think of to make my existence prickly and unbearable. Queen Hekabe loathed me; she considered me her beloved Paris’s ruination. Hektor’s wife, Andromache, loathed me because I had usurped her title of Most Beautiful – and because she was terrified Hektor might succumb to my charms. As if I could have bothered! Hektor was a prig and a nuisance, so up and down and rigid that I soon deemed him the most boring man in a court of boring men.

It was the young priestess Kassandra who terrified me. She would sweep around the halls and corridors with her black hair streaming wildly, her eyes stark with madness, her white face ravaged. Every time she saw me she would launch into a shrill diatribe of abusive nonsense, words and ideas so tangled that no one could see their logic. I was a daimon. I was a horse. I was the agent of misrule. I was in league with Dardania. I was in league with Agamemnon. I was the downfall of Troy. And so on, and so forth. She upset me, which Hekabe and Andromache soon discovered. That led them to encourage Kassandra to lie in wait for me; they hoped, of course, that I would confine myself to my room. But Helen is made of stronger stuff than that. Instead of retreating, I got into the annoying habit of joining Hekabe, Andromache and the other high noblewomen in their recreation chamber, there to irritate them by stroking my breasts (they really are gorgeous) under their scandalised eyes (not one of them could have bared her own collection of loose beans in the bottom of a bag). When that palled I would slap the servants, spill milk on their boring tapestries and lengths of cloth, engage in monologues about rape, fire and plunder. One memorable morning I enraged Andromache so much that she flew at me with teeth and nails, only to discover that Helen had wrestled as a girl, and was more than a match for a carefully nurtured lady. I tripped her up and walloped her on the eye, which swelled, closed and blackened for almost a moon. Then I went round coyly whispering that Hektor had done it.

Paris was always being nagged to discipline me; his mother in particular badgered him constantly. But whenever he sought to remonstrate with me or beg me to be nicer, I laughed at him and gave him a litany of the offences the other women committed against me. All of which meant that I saw less and less of Paris.

In early winter the first disquiet gripped the Trojan Court. It was rumoured that the Greeks were gone from the beach, that they were raiding up and down the Asia Minor coast to strike at cities and towns far apart. Yet when heavily armed detachments were sent to investigate the beach, they found the Greeks very much present, ready to issue out and skirmish. Even so, word of the raiding became positive as winter drew on; one by one Priam’s allies sent word that they could no longer honour their promises of armies in the spring. Their own lands were threatened. Tarses in Kilikia went up in flames, its people dead or sold into slavery; the fields and pastures for fifty leagues around were burned, the grain taken and loaded on board Greek ships, the stock slaughtered and smoked for Greek bellies in Kilikian smokehouses, the shrines stripped of their treasures, King Eetion’s palace looted. Mysia suffered next. Lesbos sent aid to Mysia, and in its turn was attacked. Thermi was razed to the ground; the Lesbians licked their wounds and wondered whether it might be more politic to remember the Greek half of their ancestry, and declare for Agamemnon. Then when Priene and Miletos in Karia succumbed, the panic increased. Even Sarpedon and Glaukos, the double Kings, were forced to stay at home in Lykia.