The Voyage Home

She had yellow eyes. At times, particularly by candlelight, they scarcely looked like human eyes at all. Calchas, the priest, once said they reminded him of a goat’s eyes: that she had the same numbed look of a sacrifice. I never saw her like that. She reminded me of a sea eagle, a common enough bird on the coast where I grew up; the sailors call it ‘the eagle with the sunlit eyes’. And its eyes are beautiful, but it doesn’t do to forget the brutal beak, the talons sharp enough to tear living flesh from bone. No, I didn’t see her as a victim, but then, I knew her better than most. I was her body-slave, or, to use the common, vulgar term slaves themselves use, her catch-fart. And I hated it.

That day, the day we finally abandoned the Greek camp and set sail for ‘home ’, I was feeling really fed up with her because she ’d kept me awake half the night praying – if you could call it praying.

To me, it sounded more like a married couple having a row. Apollo didn’t say much – in fact, nothing that I could hear. She was saying,‘Home? Home? ’ over and over again, as if it were the worst swear word in her vocabulary. I knew what she meant, because whatever unimaginable place our Greek captors were taking us to it certainly wouldn’t be home. Home, for me, had been a little white house on the side of a hill, the back garden so steep I had to cut terraces into it to grow my herbs. I loved that garden. There were goats at the top of the hill, so my days were punctuated by the clanking of bells. For Cassandra, home had been first a palace, then a temple, both, now, in ruins, just like my house – a shared misfortune that should probably have brought us closer than it did.

Leaving Cassandra with the cart and the baggage, I walked round the hut for the last time, checking to see we’d left nothing behind – or that she’d left nothing behind. I didn’t have anything to leave. The floorboards were gritty under my feet, the sand already starting to encroach. Normally, sweeping that out every morning was one of my jobs, but the last few days I hadn’t bothered. What was the point? The sand would be everywhere soon, piling up in corners, wedging doors shut; and after that the winter storms would begin, finding cracks in walls, blistering paint, warping wood until only a few spars would remain, scattered across a beach that had swallowed everything else. There was a bitter satisfaction in knowing that the ruined marble palaces and temples of Troy would endure for centuries to come while in a few short years the Greek camp would vanish without trace.

Being alone like this, even for a few moments, was a luxury.