The war stretched on, unending, through weeks and then months and finally years. How did they have the stomach for the fight still, I wondered. How could it be possible to rise every morning to that same grim, relentless slaughter, and then drink and sleep and wake to do it all again? The Greek army was mighty, despite the bodies that kept the bloated crows squawking greedily overhead, and we watched from atop our city walls as they built their makeshift army camp into something that resembled a civilisation.
Still, our walls stood. I could not walk beyond them any longer, but daily I stared down from them across the boiling clash of armies beneath, out towards the placid sea. I would watch until black dots shimmered and swarmed my vision, until my head throbbed and I could see no more. I was searching for the other blindness, the chasm of light, the knowledge of what was to come.
But since the day that Paris had set sail for Sparta, Apollo had not spoken to me. No agony split my skull in two, no searing flash of white dazzled me, and no insight speared me. At times, a truth would come: a child would be skipping in the street, and I would see it feverish and damp, then still as marble in a flash. A day later, the mother would be tearing her hair from the roots and raking her nails down her cheeks as she wailed to Apollo in vain. A grim-faced man, barely more than a boy, whose hands shook almost imperceptibly as he strapped his breastplate to his chest, ready to stride out on to the bloodied earth – I saw him gasping for breath under a hollow sky, his flesh smeared across the sand. These little truths assailed me day by day, but what I searched for when I stared out across the carnage, what I begged for when I prayed at the feet of Apollo’s statue every dawn, did not come.
Even I began to wonder about my own foresight; perhaps, I thought, what I had seen in Paris was simply the fact of war? Troy was ruined in many ways, the city held in stasis, all of us trapped behind stone in a siege without end. Despite myself, despite the weight of despair I carried in the pit of my stomach every day, I could not stop that treacherous green shoot of hope from interweaving with my sorrow: perhaps Troy would stand after all.
Apollo’s face in the temple was smooth, blank, empty stone. The painted eyes looked sightlessly ahead. He told me nothing.
In the early days of the siege, fear and dread lay thick upon Troy. For once, it was not me alone who saw death and destruction around every corner. Every altar carried savour to the heavens, the air was filled with incense, and the lowing of cattle led to sacrifice intermingled with the thin, melodic chanting to the gods. Throughout the city, every face was taut with anguish. Day by day, men died – husbands, brothers, sons and fathers, mangled and torn, suffocating in their own blood out there. The lands that surrounded the city fell, bit by bit, to the Greeks, taking our harvests and our animals, too. The whispering threat of hunger stalked every home. It seemed the burden of it would be too much to bear; every day, the imminent horror loomed, threatening to topple and crush us all at any moment.
But every day, it did not. My brother Hector marshalled the forces of Troy. Where the men might have weakened through fear and misery, he revitalised them with his calm command and rallied them with his hope and confidence. We learned to manage with what we had, and slowly we began to forget the fresh sea breeze and lap of the waves at our feet. It was worse for the Greeks, people agreed, away from their homes and their families, living on our beaches, hurling themselves at our steadfast walls and never making any progress. They would not be able to hold on as long as we could. An end would come, if only we could be strong and wait.
Well, we had waited and the tenth year had come, and we waited still. The days had settled into a terrible kind of routine, one that had become so familiar that often I forgot the horror of it all, until it would sweep through my body and I would go rigid with the shock of it all over again. It seemed impossible, but this was normal life to us. So it was that in that tenth year, I woke early one morning to a sky thick with clouds and a metallic taste in the air. The remnants of a dissolved dream clung to me; its fragments tantalisingly out of reach.
Something had changed. I dressed hurriedly and did not linger to drag a comb through my hair or to twist it up, but let it hang loose and tangled as I slipped through the sleeping palace into the city.
He was here. I could feel the raw edge of his menace: the fury of Apollo, as sure and steady as I had long ago felt it in the temple beneath the bruising pressure of his lips. My heart was hammering, at odds with the soft peace of the morning. I wanted to run, but it was as though quicksand sucked me down and I was held fast where I was, helpless and vulnerable. I clutched my arms about my head, felt the scrape of stones tear at my knees as I flung myself to the ground. Panting, I waited for his strike.
The moments passed. I dared to raise my head an inch from the floor as I felt him recede. Crawling to the wall, I heaved myself up against it and looked out across the battle plain, towards the Greek camp.
The pain shattered my head like a bolt of lightning. I pressed my hands hard to my temples, desperate to hold my skull in one piece. My breath left my body as his light sliced through my mind and I reeled against the clammy, fog-drenched stone.
My sight came back, piece by piece. I watched, open-mouthed, as it descended on the Greeks, invisible to anyone but me: the acrid reek of disease, the choking stench of plague, breathed from Apollo’s perfect lips, a cloud bulging and distended with every sickness he knew how to heal. A curse of open, rotting sores that would burst their flesh; burning fevers that would ravage their bodies; rattling, wheezing gasps and prayers that would go unanswered. They would beg for his mercy, for his healing powers. He would watch them die.
For ten days, we all watched them. Frantically, the Greek soldiers tried to burn the bodies, but they piled up faster than they could light the pyres. The infection swept the camp, invisible and deadly. I could feel their despair and their terror from the cushioned couches the slaves dragged to the edge of the palace courtyard so that my parents could watch along with me. Andromache, too, cradling her son, her body tensed with hope.
Hector, of course, galloped ahead of the Trojans. Our men were buoyed, giddy with their advantage. There was no one to drive them back. The Greek forces were depleted; so many of their men sickened and dying, or dead already from Apollo’s plague. They clung on, but only barely, and it seemed impossible that they could hold out against us any longer. The end of the war rose before us; a beautiful vision that seemed so close within our grasp. Only I, alone in my family, alone in the city, did not believe it.
Whether it was the burning altars the Greeks lit in honour of Apollo or some other appeasement, the eleventh day dawned fresh and clear. The vile miasma that had hung across the Greek camp burned away with the sunrise. Undaunted, my brother led his troops once more into battle with their exhausted enemy.
That evening, Hector returned at sunset exultantly, reporting that although sickness no longer ravaged the Greek armies, Achilles refused to fight alongside them. He and his Myrmidons had stayed away from the battle. And true enough, we did not see the unmistakable sight of his chariot flying across the plains after that: the chariot that, every day before, had left our sons and brothers and husbands hacked and mutilated in his wake.
If Achilles had withdrawn from the war, then victory was ours – and everyone in Troy knew it. Weeks passed, but our confidence continued to grow. The Greeks may have survived a plague, but they could never win without Achilles. It was only a matter of time. I saw Andromache’s tired eyes aglow, a nervous smile daring to lift her lips. My mother, drinking wine, the tension loosened from her shoulders. And Helen, her face as calm and beautiful as it had ever been.