Even Helen, whose delinquent passion had precipitated all these years of suffering, had ceased to whimper. Having been so appalled by the sight of warm blood leaking across the bed that she might have screamed and been unable then to cease from screaming, she was now staring at her husband with a kind of wonder. For the first time in many weeks she was thinking about someone other than herself, and feelings that she had long thought petrified began to stir with an almost illicit tenderness. Was it possible then that, for all the offence she had given him, and all the anguish she had caused, this gentle-hearted man still loved her?
Afraid that she might break the spell that had so far spared her life, she raised a bare arm and stretched out her hand to comfort his quaking shoulder.
Instantly, as though that touch had seared like flame, Menelaus pulled away. He leapt to his feet and turned, lips quivering, to stare down at the woman lying beneath him. Unable to endure the naked vulnerability of her breasts, his gaze shifted away to where Deiphobus lay with his eyes open and blood still draining from the ragged stump of the wrist. Menelaus bared his teeth and uttered a low growl. Dismayed that he had been so visibly overcome by weakness, resolved to countermand all signs of it, he picked up his sword from where it had fallen to the floor and began to hack once more at the lifeless flesh.
Watching Helen cower across the bed, Odysseus knew he had seen enough. If, in his madness, Menelaus desired to murder the woman who had betrayed him, that was his business. Odysseus would not stay to witness it. Silently he turned away and passed through the door, leaving his friend to do as he wished with the dead body of his enemy and the terrified, living body of his wife.
As he stepped out into the night air, he caught a smell of burning drifting upwards from the lower city. From somewhere in the distance, beyond the walls, he made out the din of swords beating against shields: a host of Argive warriors were still climbing the ramp and roaring as they poured through the open gate. Hundreds – perhaps thousands – more were already inside the walls, taking command of the streets and extinguishing whatever resistance the bewildered citizens were managing to muster. The nearer sounds of screaming and shouting were hideous on his ears. Yet it would all be over soon, Odysseus thought as he crossed the courtyard of Helen’s mansion; the Trojans would come to their senses and lay down their arms in surrender of their captured city. Even to the bravest and most fanatical among them, any other course of action must soon come to seem futile and insane. But he was worried by that smell of burning.
When he came out into the street he found the cobbles underfoot slippery with blood and he was forced to pick his way among the corpses. Here they were mostly top-knotted Thracian tribesmen who lay thrown over one another in lax postures, with slack jaws, like too many drunkards in the gutters. There was no sign of movement anywhere among them. From the top of the rise, beyond their silence, came the shouts of Argive soldiers and a terrible screaming.
Afterwards Odysseus would wonder how he could not have been prepared for what awaited him there. After all, he had sacked towns before. He had killed men and taken women into slavery. In the heat of battle he was as ruthless as the next man and had never lost much sleep over what he had done. It was the way of things. It had always been so and nothing would change it. Yet when he turned the corner and saw three Spartans laughing as they tugged at the legs of a white bearded-old man who was trying to climb over a wall, then thrust their spears through his nightshirt into his scrawny belly, he was not prepared. He was not prepared for the way, all along the street, doors had been broken down and the terrified, unarmed figures of men and boys were being driven from their homes at spear-point and cut down by the warriors waiting for them.
When Odysseus saw their sergeant swing his sword at the neck of a sobbing youth with such force that it almost severed the head, he grabbed the man by the shoulder, shouting, ‘In the name of all the gods, what are you doing? These people aren’t putting up any resistance.’ But the sergeant merely shrugged and said, ‘So what? They’re Trojans, aren’t they?’ and turned away to pull the next cowering figure towards the sweep of his sword. Odysseus saw the naked man’s throat splash open as he crumpled and fell. He looked up through a slaughter-house stench of blood and saw such deft butchery repeated again and again along the length of the street while women with their hands in their hair stood screaming as they watched. One of them threw herself over the body of her husband only to be dragged away while a burly axeman finished him off.
Odysseus shouted out a demand to know who was in command here, but his voice was lost in the shrieking of the women and he received no answer. He pushed his way along the street, making for the square outside the temple of Athena, and saw Acamas, son of Theseus, who had ridden inside the wooden horse with him, holding a man by the hair as he twisted his sword in his guts. Hearing Odysseus shout out his name, Acamas looked up, smiled in recognition, let the man drop, and stepped back, wiping the sweat from his brow.
‘It’s going well,’ he said as Odysseus came up to him.
‘But none of these people are armed,’ Odysseus shouted above the din. ‘There was an agreement.’ He took in the warrior’s puzzled frown. ‘We gave Antenor our word!’ he shouted. ‘We said we’d spare the lives of all those who surrendered.’
Acamas glanced away at where his men were working their way like dogged harvesters through a huddled crowd of Trojan men and boys trapped in a narrow corner of the street. ‘That’s not what I was told,’ he said. ‘We’re under orders to kill the lot and that’s what we’re doing. It’s the same all over the city.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Odysseus protested. ‘Where’s Agamemnon?’
‘Probably strutting through King Priam’s palace by now. I haven’t seen him.’ Acamas wiped a bloody hand across his mouth. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s still a lot of work to do.’ Then he turned away, lifting his sword.
In what should have been the most glorious hour of his life, Odysseus was seized by a numbing sense of dread. To fight in open combat across the windy plain of Troy had been one thing: this slaughter of defenceless men, stinking of piss and panic as they stumbled from their sleep into narrow alleys from which there could be no escape, was quite another. Yet the havoc in these streets had already run so far beyond control it was clear that any male Trojan, man or boy, would be lucky to survive the night.
In a fury of disgust, Odysseus turned to push his way through the throng, looking for Agamemnon. The smell of burning was stronger now and through a thickening gush of smoke a lurid flame-light glared out of the darkness of the lower city. If fire had broken out among the weaving halls with their bales of cloth, reels of yarn, and timber looms, then more people might be burnt to death or trampled in the scramble for safety than would fall to the sword. The dogs of the city barked and whined. Coarse laughter surrounded a frantic screaming where a man was being tormented somewhere. Women cried out as they were pulled from the sanctuary of holy altars and driven like geese along the streets. Children sobbed above the bodies of their fathers. And when Odysseus strode into the square before the temple of Athena he saw the immense moonlit form of the wooden horse, like a monstrous figment from a dream, looming in silence over the spectacle of a city in its death throes.
Sick with shame, he remembered how he had harangued the troops on the day when it looked as though they might refuse to follow Agamemnon when he called for a renewed assault on the city. That had been months ago but he remembered how he’d incited them with the thought of the women waiting to be raped inside these walls. How easily the words had sprung to his lips. How little thought he’d given to the price they would exact in human suffering. But now Odysseus stood in the shadow of the horse that had sprung from his imagination, watching men kill and die in helpless multitudes. In conceiving his clever stratagem to breach the unbreachable walls of Troy, he had released ten murderous years of rage and frustration into the streets of the city. Never had he seen so many people cut down like cattle in a hecatomb. Never before had he felt so entirely culpable. When he looked about him, there seemed no limits to the horror he had wrought.
Still shaking from having seen her husband’s head lopped off by that monstrous boy Neoptolemus, Queen Hecuba was among the first of the women to be dragged beneath the open portico in the square. Her younger daughters,