Penelope's Web Read online

  And for this . . . for this I die, dreams the dying Iphigenia, for something that happened far away from here and has nothing to do with me. Why is it always like this? Why is death such an irrelevance? Why is war so strange? And the winds will blow all these lads to Troy, blown by my last breath, also to die, for a cause they care nothing for and which touches them not.

  They pile up the cypresses for her pyre. The singing wind strikes the flames, sings in the sails that flutter under the breath of gods. She burns on the beach, a slip of a girl, not much of her to burn. Her scent goes up to the sky.

  We were blood-brothers now with Agamemnon, partners to his ploy, his ruthless intent on Troy. And we were murderers. It would take many a sea to wash off Iphigenia’s blood. It had begun: Iphigenia, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Orestes, the Furies. Helen had unleashed a universal mad dog, a blood-cycle without end. You could read it all in Clytemnestra’s eyes as she followed her husband in her head, the future in the instant, all the way to Troy and back, to the bloodbath she planned for him. Agamemnon was a dead man. The troops stood and cheered a corpse as he gave the order for the fleet to leave.

  We took different routes to Troy, but we all went up the channel between the Greek coast and Euboea, then eastward to Imbros. After that it was a mere twenty miles to Troy, and though there was no navy to intercept us, we fanned out anyway – south by Lesbos, north-west near Sigeum, or as I did with Achilles and Patroclus, along the Thracian coast, approaching Troy variously. The bird-beaked galleys massed again by Tenedos: thirty-five-footers, ninety-footers, fifty-oared penteconters. Over fifteen thousand men left Aulis. And not many of them came back. But nobody thought of not returning as the heroes hurtled across the surf, and certainly not of the untended crops they’d left behind rotted and dying. That would be the fate of the heroes too, most of them, rotted and forgotten in other fields, foreign fields, far from home.

  SIX

  For Helen.

  They all died for Helen – so lamented Penelope. Heroes for Helen’s sake, dead on both sides, and in terrible numbers, casualties of the quest. She was Agamemnon’s secret weapon, his human shield, hiding his greed, or so he thought – but not from his wife. Helen fulfilled a need, the eternal itch of the Middle East.

  Who was she? What was she? This weapon of mass destruction. What made her?

  Swan-rape made her.

  Picture her mother, Leda, a famous beauty – married to Tyndareus, King of Sparta – bathing by the banks of the Eurotas, ringed by Lacedaemon’s lovely hills. In the centre of that ring of hills she stands naked in the enraptured eye of the great god Zeus, who swoops down from Olympia, turning, as he descends, into a giant swan and rapes her.

  Or does he?

  See her in the web, Leda, bent over on the riverbank in the act of washing, and the god taking her from behind, biting her nape before making for the vulva, his long neck probing like an enormous phallus, and Leda’s hand reaching awkwardly between and behind, fumbling with the beak . . .

  Swan-rape?

  That’s how it started. But what is she doing now? Is she protecting herself or guiding the way? Preventing him or helping him in?

  Look at the next scene. She has wrenched herself round to face her attacker and the beak is thrust in her mouth like the bright tip of a penis. Thrusting or sucking – which is it? Her legs are forced apart and are wrapped around the feathered rapist. Her behind is high off the ground, her heels dig in. Bucking or struggling? Agony or ecstasy? It’s hard to interpret the expression on her face, but it appears that what began as rape has turned into entirely another affair, one of lust picking up on lust, not an enforced impregnation but an unexpected congress of appetites, human, avian, divine. Helen will emerge from it to excite men to lechery, abduction, war. And more rape. Rape will breed rape. Brutal, ambivalent, murky lust. That is her genesis.

  It’s not all. Go back to the first scene again and look closer. As she bends double, either in pleasure or in pain, the belly is already bulging, sagging close to the grassy bank, almost touching it. She is already pregnant to Tyndareus, so the god’s is an additional impregnation. Impossible in life, easy in myth, achievable in art.

  They turned out to be quite a brood. Helen’s half-sister was Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband, who’d murdered their daughter, and who was murdered in turn by their son, avenging his father. Two brothers, Castor and Pollux, were preordained to be famous rapists. They raped two sisters, died young, never made it to Troy. And they all came out of a clutch of eggs.

  That’s Penelope’s version. An alien embrace, a swan’s thrust, a shudder in the loins that engenders all the rest: the thousand ships, the toppled towers, burning, murder, rape. Achilles, Hector, Paris, Agamemnon dead. All dead. All dead for her. And that shudder was repeated over and over. Every time the Trojan women saw her, they passed her with that same shudder. Breast, back, belly and in between.

  The eggs lay low among the Spartan hills on the lower slopes of snow-capped Taygetus, wooded with pear and juniper, wild with woodbine and irises, scented with myrtle, rosemary and thyme, danger nestling snug in an idyll. A shepherd stumbled on them and, because of their abnormal size, carried them carefully to the palace, where Helen was hatched.

  Like a plot.

  She emerged as white as the shell that had held her and needed no white-lead to beautify her skin. Already she stood out like a pearl in an oyster, ashen, immaculate, alabaster, blanched and wan as a goddess, offspring of a swan. Look at her – she walks right out of the web, vibrant and alive. The teeth are ivory, the tresses gold, the neck like the divine father’s when he swanned on the Eurotas. Her hands are like snow, her cheeks like shrouds. She stands in a field of crimson poppies. Or is it a field of blood, streaming around her feet?

  Equivocation, ambivalence, right from the start, before even the beginning. The most beautiful woman in the world. Yet even that is only a half truth, as she is only half woman. She comes to Paris gift-wrapped in ambiguity, shadows of doubt, a dubious prize. Even the identity of her mother is in question – Danaë perhaps, or even Nemesis, and not Leda at all. But for Penelope it’s Leda, and the swan is the perfect parentage for Helen. She comes not out of a womb but, like a serpent, out of an egg.

  Helen is damaged goods. And she will be further damaged long before Paris sets eyes on her, long before the competition for her hand. She will be damaged before she even grows up, she will be sexually impaired, and her spoiler will be the great hero Theseus, King of Athens, now however a wreck of his former self. He’d killed the Minotaur, punched it to death bare-fisted, crushed its skull. He’d sailed to Colchis with Jason and the Argonauts to bring back the golden fleece. He’d hunted the Calydonian Boar, defeated the Amazons, saved Athens.

  But the years don’t always confer wisdom. In his old age he turned cruel and desperate and hit it off with Pirithous, King of the Lapiths. They formed an evil partnership and swore to help each other to abduct the daughters of Zeus. Pirithous chose Persephone, and the two ravishers entered the cave at Taenarum and set off for the realm of the dead. Pirithous never made it back out of Hades: he remained stuck to the terrible seat near the spinning wheel on which his father, Ixion, was tortured. Theseus would have suffered the same fate, but Heracles begged for him and he was released, only to end his days wretchedly and in exile. He never became King of Athens again.

  In this disreputable old age of his, Theseus went for Zeus’s only daughter by a mortal. White Helen. He saw her while she was worshipping in the temple of Artemis in Sparta, abducted her and took her back to Athens, where he repeatedly raped her. But the Athenians revolted, sickened by his behaviour, and he carried her to the nearby castle of Aphidna, closely guarded and attended by his mother, Aethra. There he carried on raping her.

  Rape ran in the family – Helen’s. Conceived by rape, with rapist brothers, later to be raped by Paris – politically, if not enforced – this child-rape was part of the larger picture in which Theseus merely played his part. Pene
lope was always ready to excuse anybody who’d hurt Helen, always eager to illustrate the extenuating circumstances, assuming there were any. If they didn’t exist, she made them up.

  Observe. Theseus was a recent widower, sunk in his sorrow, poor old man, and Helen was prancing and dancing in the sanctuary, stark-naked on the riverbank where her mother had been raped years earlier. He was consumed by sudden lust, so struck with longing he knew that no matter what his past greatness, life was no longer worth living without her. He had to have her. And the ultimate intimacy was all that mattered.

  His intimacy took an interesting form. He buggered her. And he did it from the purest of motives – to keep her a virgin. Observe the expression on her face as the king comes in carefully from behind. The eyes are tight shut, the mouth wide open. He seems to be giving her pleasure. But it’s costing him. He’s puffing and blowing and has to stop for breath before he recommences his sodomy. She waits for him to continue his assault. It’s her first time. She almost looks sorry for the poor old stick.

  Artemis could have stepped in and saved her, but the chaste huntress fails to appear, and Theseus goes unpunished. Penelope makes no attempt to illustrate his sexual history. In fact, he was far from unpractised in the art of raping virgins, after first killing their fathers. He once raped fifty in a day, out-raping Heracles. He abandoned Ariadne, slept with Hippolyta, attempted Persephone, assisting Pirithous, taking on Hades. But none of that appears in Penelope’s web. And his abduction of Helen is a mere footnote to that history.

  On the other hand, her brothers, the Dioscuri, who came to rescue her, are made to look like the villains of the piece. They liberated her from her prison in Aphidna. Practised raiders and rapists, they could have stormed the fortress, taken her, and left. Instead they ravaged Attica and took their revenge on Theseus by capturing his old mother, Aethra, raping and enslaving her and making her empty Helen’s chamber pots.

  ‘Our sister’s piss is better than your blood,’ they told her. ‘Handle it with care.’

  Some say they made her drink it.

  They raped her in spite of her age. Or because of it. And they congratulated one another on their achievement.

  Rape and counter-rape. As old as the hills. As for the territorial incursion, the violation of a religious temple, the assault on a princess, little is made of Theseus’s crimes. In the web Helen herself appears at the heart of the conflict – dancing naked, flat on her back, bending over, bent double, legs in the air, from the tenderest age she’s always there. Even in the womb she’s there.

  So Theseus raped her.

  How old was she at the time? Twelve years old? Ten? Or even seven? The stories differ, according to the version of the legend you hear, or want to hear.

  Or see.

  Penelope’s is multiple myth. Helen is seven. And ten. And twelve. And all ages in between. She is Theseus’s prisoner and he abuses her whenever he feels like it. Over years. She grows up buggered. Literally.

  The abuse is constant. But the seven-year-old Theseus saw in Sparta is still a virgin, if you accept anal intercourse as an emblem of the inviolate. Ravish the arse and venerate the vagina: it takes some imagining, but it worked for Theseus.

  How long he might have kept her in this arguably immaculate condition remains an imponderable. When he hears that the brothers are finally coming to rescue her, he rapes her from the front. She is old enough now for her belly to swell, and she later gives birth to Iphigenia, who is bundled off at once to her aunt Clytemnestra to be sheltered from disgrace. By this time the brothers have razed Aphidna, raped and enslaved Aethra, and brought Helen to Sparta, to her father Tyndareus, who decides it’s high time his daughter should be married.

  SEVEN

  A god-almighty roar went up as the first of the assault ships left Aulis. They must have heard the cheering in Anatolia. Hundreds followed. And the thousand ships supposedly launched that day, a catalogue, to be precise, of one thousand one hundred and eighty-six vessels under forty-four leaders, all of them named, present and correct in Penelope’s web? Averaging fifty hands per ship, that would have given the Trojans a Greek fleet of sixty thousand men to meet and match. If they hadn’t actually shat themselves, then with the many nations coming to their defence, not to mention the allies fighting on both sides, it would have engendered an epic conflict, as epic as anybody’s imagination could have made it.

  And Penelope was not short on imagination. She exaggerated the timescale as well as the numbers – her figures were fictitious and well off the map, a fabrication. All the same, she conveyed the spirit of the enterprise accurately enough. Troy was no backwater scrap. For the men who fought it, it was the motherfucker of all wars.

  The biggest cheese in Greece, Agamemnon had ensured that anyone who was anyone had turned up at Aulis with ships and soldiers, and that nobody outnumbered his own contribution. Menelaus himself came nowhere near his brother, and my own twelve ships seemed modest, even for a small island like Ithaca. But other leaders had done the expedition proud. Philoctetes had come from the heights of Pelion and Ossa, where he was a famous archer. Diomedes’ troops were there in strength from Argos and Tiryns. Both Ajaxes had arrived commanding large numbers – Big Ajax, big on brawn, short on brain, and Little Ajax, short on both, an utter thug with a murderer’s mentality, and fast on his feet. We called him the Runner. Tlepolemus was another murdering thug who’d killed his great-uncle, as it happened. Bad to his friends, worse to his enemies – that was his motto, and he lived up to it. The decent and entirely amiable Idomeneus had come from Crete, and Achilles from Phthia with his Myrmidons. The latter were the crack troops of the Greek army, the elite, the death-squad. And every one of them was ready to die for their leader.

  Not that Achilles wanted anybody to die for him. He made that message come across CFB, clear as a fucking bell.

  ‘I’ve no desire to cross the wine-dark fucking sea to fill up Agamemnon’s treasure chests,’ he said.

  Or, for that matter, to put Menelaus back where he belonged between his wife’s wayward thighs. I had to agree with him there. We’d both done what we could to avoid active service but excuses had proved useless. Even if you’d lost an arm or a leg you were expected to turn up just to piss on a Trojan. Or fuck his woman.

  ‘Your dick still works, doesn’t it? Bring any weapon you like, but come to the party. Everybody’s expected.’

  Agamemnon. Your head would have to be missing before he’d even consider scratching you off the list. Even then, he’d just tell you to stick it back on again and do your bit.

  As the old story goes, when they came to Ithaca to enlist me I tried to get out of it on medical grounds. There was obviously fuck-all wrong with me, so I argued a mental condition. And Penelope wove a good yarn out of it. The recruiting officers arrived to find an Odysseus who’d gone stark raving mad. I was busy trying to plough the beach – with an ox and a donkey yoked up together. And I was sowing the sands with salt.

  ‘You see how he is,’ shrugged Penelope. ‘What can you do with him?’

  They seemed convinced, and it looked as if I’d got away with it. Nobody needs a madman in an army, they said, at least not on their side. The leaders were mad enough for the whole force.

  ‘Leave the poor bastard be, lads, and let’s get going.’

  But one of the officers, Palamedes, was on to me and one step ahead. He took my infant son Telemachus from his mother’s arms and set him down right in the path of the plough. I swerved to avoid killing him, of course, and neatly revealed my sanity. Palamedes had called my bluff and I’d get the bastard back for that in Troy, when the time came.

  As a matter of fact, Palamedes did play his part in my enlisting but it was a whole lot less dramatic than that. He just kept on his bastard rasping in my ear and yapping up my arse till I concluded it would be a lot less wearisome to go to war. But there’s not much of a myth in that, is there? It just doesn’t show the lengths I’d have gone to stay at home with the wife and son I loved so
much. What would any soldier do in my place? That was Penelope’s point. And, like all myths, it was true.

  She told an even better one about Achilles. His goddess mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, had heard a prophecy that if her son went to Troy he’d be killed in action. Her husband Peleus heard this too, and although they’d split up by then, they acted together to try to thwart fate. The plan was to disguise Achilles as a girl and hide him among women. So he was sent to Skyros, where he was dressed up as one of the daughters of King Lykomedes and given the name of Pyrrha.

  In fact, Achilles did go to Skyros and spent a lot of time with the women of the court. But he was a man all right, as one of the women, Deidameia, found out when he knocked her up. That’s what happens in the real world. What also happened is that Calchas made another of his amen-wallah pronouncements – that the war would be lost unless Achilles joined up and brought his Myrmidons into the field. Otherwise Troy would never fall.

  Agamemnon wasted no time. He sent me to Skyros see if Achilles really was holed up there.

  ‘You’re an old fox, Odysseus,’ he said. ‘If anybody can find him, you can.’

  I said I’d do my best and asked if I could have a partner.

  ‘Who’d you like? Take anyone you fancy.’

  I said I’d take Diomedes.

  So the pair of us turn up in Skyros, but in disguise ourselves, as merchants. We’re laden with bales of beautiful fabrics and ready-made dresses, among which I’d concealed a number of necklaces, pendants, earrings and bracelets – and a weapon. A huge sword. The women went wild over the finery and the sudden finds, all except one, who went straight for the sword, and handled it with obvious interest, not to say skill. At that point, Diomedes organised a commotion just outside the door: a trumpet-call, a clash of arms, a fake attack. And all the girls screamed and ran about. All apart from Pyrrha, who swung the sword and stood ready to fight.