could not prevent her teeth from chattering as she crouched beside her mother who sat nursing Andromache’s head in her lap. Beside them Cassandra whispered prophecies that the Trojans would prove more fortunate than their enemies. They had at least died in defence of their sacred homeland, while thousands of the barbarian invaders had perished far from their homes, and those who made it back to Argos would find a cruel fate waiting for them.
‘Agamemnon will see that he has taken death into his bed,’ Cassandra chanted. ‘Already the lioness couples with the goat. A blade glints in the bath-house. A torrent of blood flows there. I too shall be swept away on that red tide. But the son of Agamemnon shall bring a bloody end to Neoptolemus. He will leave his impious body dead beneath Apollo’s stone. As for that ingenious fiend Odysseus, Blue-haired Poseidon will keep him far from the home while others junket and riot in his hall. The Goddess will seize his heart. Hades will open his dark door to him. Death will crowd his house.’ But none of the women believed the mad girl any more than they could silence her. So they sat together under the portico, watching the sun come up and dreading what the day must bring.
Exhausted from the efforts of the night, most of the Argive leaders were relaxing in the palace across the square. The first elation of victory had passed and the rush of wine to their heads brought, at that early hour, only a queasy sense of what they had achieved. Odysseus had wandered off alone somewhere. Apart from Menelaus, who still brooded in the mansion that Paris had built for Helen, the others were carousing together, but there were grumbles of dissent from Acamas and his brother Demophon when Neoptolemus claimed the right to take Polyxena for his own before the lots had been apportioned.
Annoyed that even in this hour of triumph, discord should have broken out so quickly among his followers, Agamemnon stood uncertainly. He knew there was some justice in the complaint but he was reluctant to offend Neoptolemus who had shown a ferocity in the fight against the Ethiopians that had astounded older, battle-hardened men. Also he knew what fate lay in store for Polyxena if he acceded to this demand, and his thoughts had involuntarily darkened at the memory of what he had done to his own daughter Iphigenaia.
Seeing his hesitation, Neoptolemus declared that the shade of his father had demanded in a dream that the girl who had betrayed him should be sacrificed on his tomb. ‘Does the High King not believe that the man who did so much to win this war should be accorded such justice? Would you deny my father’s shade?’
Immediately Agamemnon made the sign to ward off the evil eye. A quarrel with Achilles had almost lost him this war once. He would not risk another with his angry ghost. ‘Take her,’ he said. ‘It is only just.’
So Neoptolemus came to claim Polyxena in the early morning light. Again he summoned her out of the huddle of women. Again Hecuba rose to protect her youngest daughter. But the weary young warrior was in no mood to listen to her pleas and insults. ‘If you don’t want to feel the flat of my sword on your old bones,’ he snarled, ‘tell your daughter to show herself.’
Polyxena rose from the place where she had been crouching. ‘I am here,’ she declared in a voice that shook as she spoke. ‘Achilles asked for me more gently. If you hope to emulate your father, you must learn to speak with something other than your sword.’
‘Come into the light,’ Neoptolemus answered. ‘Let me take a look at you.’
Loosing the hand of Laodice, Polyxena stepped between the women huddled round her and stared without flinching at the youth. Being his senior by three years or more, she might, in other circumstances, have taunted him for parading in the suit of armour that had been made to fit his father’s broader shoulders. But she knew that her life stood in graver danger now than when she had met with Achilles in Apollo’s temple at Thymbra. Her face was flushed with fear. Her breath was drawn too quickly. When Neoptolemus smiled at the swift rise and fall of her recently budded breasts she glanced away.
‘I understand that my father sought to befriend you,’ he said. ‘Is that not so?’
‘Achilles asked to speak with me, yes.’
‘But it was you who made the first approach.’
Nervously she whispered, ‘My father asked it of me.’ Polyxena’s gaze had been fixed on the ground beneath her. Now she looked up hopelessly into those cold eyes. ‘We thought it the only hope of having Hector’s body returned to us.’
‘And because my father had a noble heart he acceded to that hope, did he not?’
Polyxena nodded and averted her eyes.
‘Yet that was not the last time you saw him?’
Her arms were crossed at her breast. Now she was trembling so much that she could barely speak. ‘But it was Achilles who sought me out.’
‘Perhaps you had given him cause to do so?’
‘I swear not,’ she gasped. ‘The priest told me he had come looking for me many times. The thought of it frightened me. I didn’t understand what he wanted.’
‘But still you came.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you didn’t come alone. You told your treacherous brother Paris that Achilles was to be found unguarded at the temple of Apollo. You told him exactly when he would be there. You told him to bring his bow and kill my father in vengeance for the death of your brother Hector.’
‘That is not how it was!’ Polyxena cried.
But Neoptolemus was not listening. He was remembering that Odysseus had told him how, in a quiet hour together, Achilles had confessed his tender feelings for Polyxena. Looking at the girl now – the tousled ringlets blowing about her face, the delicate hands at her shoulders, the shape of her slim thighs disclosed by the pull of the breeze at her shift – he thought he understood how this alluring combination of poise and vulnerability might have tugged at his father’s heart.
It did so now, seditiously, at his own.
Yet this girl had betrayed his father, whose shade cried out for vengeance.
‘And is not Thymbra under the protection of the god?’ he demanded. ‘Isn’t it a sacred place of truce where men from both sides – Argive and Trojan alike – were free to make their offerings without fear?’
Seeing that her truth and his must forever lie far from each other’s reach, Polyxena lowered her head again and consigned herself to silence.
Accusation gathered force in his voice. ‘But you and your brothers lacked all reverence for the god. Together you violated the sanctuary of Apollo’s temple. Your brothers were afraid to face my father in open combat like true men, so they set a trap for him. And you, daughter of Priam, were the willing bait in that trap.’
In a low whisper Polyxena said, ‘I knew nothing of what they planned.’
Neoptolemus snorted. ‘I think you’re lying to me – as you lied to my father before me. I think, daughter of Priam, that it’s time you were purified of lies.’
He turned away from her and gestured to the two Myrmidons who stood at his back. The women who had listened with pent breath to their tense exchanges began to moan and whimper as the Myrmidons stepped forward to seize Polyxena by her thin arms.
Swaying where she stood, Hecuba screeched, ‘Where are you taking her?’
‘To my father’s tomb,’ Neoptolemus answered coldly. ‘There is a last service she can perform for him there.’ Then all the women were wailing again as they watched Polyxena dragged off through the gritty wind blowing across the square, past the impassive effigy of the horse, towards the Scaean Gate.
Walking at dawn through ransacked streets where only the dead were gathered, Odysseus disturbed vultures and pie-dogs already tugging at the silent piles of human flesh. They cowered at his approach or flapped away on verminous wings, peevishly watching as he stared at the horror of what had been done.
During the course of the night a living city had been transformed