Free Beauty's Daughter: The Story of Hermione and Helen of Troy by Carolyn Meyer Page B

own Hermione.”
    He pulled me close to his chest, and I felt his bushy beard against my cheek. His tears dropped on my face as he held me at arm’s length to study me before pulling me close again. “But how . . . ?” he stammered. “Who . . . ?”
    “I couldn’t bear to go back to Mycenae. And I wanted to be with you, and to help you get my mother back.” I explained then how I had boarded the women’s ship at Aulis.
    “And you’ve been on the women’s ship all this time?” he asked incredulously.
    “I stay with the old crone, Marpessa. She’s been very kind to me. She makes sure the men who visit the women don’t bother me.”
    “And you have not been defiled?” he asked.
    “I’m not yet a woman,” I said, embarrassed to have to confess it to my father.
    “I thought not. But they didn’t find out who you are?”
    “I told them I was the daughter of Queen Helen, but they only laughed at me. They think I’m your bastard.”
    Father grunted but made no comment.
    “You will not return to that ship,” he said firmly. “You will stay with me. I have servants who will see that you’re properly cared for.”
    “Will I have a sleeping fleece?” I asked. That was the one hardship I’d found difficult to endure. At home I’d always had clean fleeces for my bed, but on the women’s ship I’d had to share Marpessa’s ragged and smelly pile of empty grain sacks.
    “You will have as many fleeces as you wish, my dear Hermione,” Father assured me. “Now come with me.”
    He climbed the rope ladder to the deck of his ship, and I followed wearily. The watchman glanced at me curiously as Father led me through the narrow passage between the rowers’ benches to his barren quarters. “You will stay here for the present,” he told me. “I’ll sleep among the men. You have nothing to fear.”
    “I’m not afraid,” I told my father, smiling up at him. I had forgiven him for sacrificing Iphigenia, and I was happy to be there with him and gave no thought to the danger.
    The next morning the men gathered on the beach and made offerings to the gods. Then they strapped the metal greaves to their legs, donned their bronze helmets, picked up their leather shields made of layers of bulls’ hides, gathered their sharpened spears, and prepared to fight.

 
     
     
     
Book II
The War

10
The Tenth Year
    CALCHAS WAS CORRECT. THE war dragged on and on, year after year, with heavy losses on both sides, no clear winners, and countless souls hurled down to the House of Death. During these long years I witnessed the behavior of the gods—some favoring the Greeks, others the Trojans, sometimes switching sides unexpectedly. Every winter the fighting was suspended, as is customary, and our men spent their time improving our fortifications. Each commander lived in a well-made tent or a hut built of hewn fir with a thatched roof, surrounded by a cluster of the soldiers’ rude shelters. The Greek encampment on the beach had taken on an air of permanence.
    With the arrival of spring in the tenth year of the war, the fighting was about to begin again. I was so weary of it! Surely the men must have been weary of it too. Didn’t they long for their homeland, yearn for their wives and children? Yet it had been going on for so long that war had become the only life they knew.
    I was twenty now, no longer a child, and I lived comfortably in my own tent with several women servants, but sometimes I missed the company of the concubines. Without them, it was much harder to find out what was going on in other parts of the camp. From time to time I sent one or two of my servants to Marpessa, now old and bent and nearly toothless, and in exchange Marpessa sent a couple of her women to stay with me for a few nights and to pass on whatever rumors they’d heard from the men. Father, consumed by the war, had no knowledge of this.
    Achilles, I was told, had grown increasingly restless. He regularly led his Myrmidons on raiding