Among those barbarians women have no say in their own destinies; daughters are exhibited to prospective suitors, then bargained for and decided upon by their fathers or other male kin.
The suitors besieging her father’s house were many and powerful. Helen’s father favored Menalaos, King of Sparta, because his own ancestry was rooted there. When Menalaos came to the palace Helen was allowed to have dinner with him and his companions. While I watched from the kitchen doorway, she sat next to her father, quaking inside through every moment without me by her side. Menalaos was more than fifteen years older than she, already past thirty; flecks of gray showed in his hair. He jabbed at his food with a dagger and dripped wine into his beard. She was terrified of him.
Her father, Tyndareos, had different worries. He feared that whichever one of the besieging suitors he chose, the choice would antagonize all the others. They were hot-tempered men, powerful and quick to make war, each of those who sought Helen’s hand; they would make deadly enemies. Yet the longer her father hesitated, the more the eager princes pressed him for a decision. Helen waited in an agony of suspense, wishing that she could run far away.
I had told her about the splendor of Egypt since she’d been a baby, of the magnificent cities and great pyramids that had been erected before the beginning of time.
“I wish we could go to Egypt,” Helen said to me, more than once during those nerve-stretching days.
“Ah, there is a land where a beautiful princess is treated properly,” I told her. “There is a land of true civilization.”
She sighed and pined for glorious Egypt while her father struggled over his decision about her fate.
Then ever-shrewd Odysseos, her father’s friend, suggested a solution. Upon a visit to Calydon Odysseos listened to Tyndareos’ fears, then told him to make all the suitors take a solemn oath that they would accept his choice and support her betrothed, should the need ever arise. They all agreed soon enough, each man hoping to be the one favored above all the others, each fearful that winning Helen would also win the jealousy of all the other princes. Thus they swore their pledge.
As he had planned to do all along, Tyndareos wed Helen to the King of Sparta: Menalaos, of the house of Atreos, brother to mighty Agamemnon. It seemed a good match to her father, but Helen was not happy with it. And she feared the anger of Athene, for Helen had dedicated herself to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and the omens told of Athene’s displeasure with her.
To doubly assure his safety, her father also wed Helen’s older sister, Clytemnestra, to Menalaos’ brother Agamemnon of Argos, King of liongated Mycenae. His house was thus doubly bound to the house of Atreos and the two most powerful kingdoms in Pelops.
Sparta was a crushing disappointment to Helen. She had dreamed of a well-built citadel, with many servants for the new queen, and a kind and loving husband. Instead, Menalaos’ house was like a cold, dreary stone dungeon; its floor was bare earth and the smoke from its hearth fire made your eyes sting. The serving people were dull, surly. Her husband and his noble kinfolk talked of nothing but hunting and war. She was a queen, yet she was expected to spin and weave and serve her lord without question. She was his possession, his chattel. Helen felt that even Aphrodite had abandoned her.
All that she knew of the arts of love was what I had told her.
“Your duty is to please your husband,” I instructed Helen on the day of her wedding in Sparta. “Your own plea sure is not so important as his.”
I knew Helen had heard tales of married women who had taken lovers. And of what happened to them when their husbands found out.
“Should I expect no plea sure at all from my husband?” she asked me tearfully.
I grasped her chin gently. “Light of my days, women are vessels for men’s passion, and we must be satisfied to please them. A woman’s happiness comes from the children she bears. Think of them when making love with your husband.”
Her wedding night was no surprise, then. While her husband drank and caroused with his male relatives and friends, I helped Helen out of her gold-embroidered wedding dress and into a shimmering nightgown that clung to her young body. When Menalaos lurched through the bedroom door, Helen flinched with terror, yet she dutifully stepped to the well-draped bed and waited with wide, fearful eyes for him to strip while I went to the next room and shut the heavy oaken door with troubled, trembling hands.
And listened.
More than half drunk from the feasting, Menalaos used her, took her virginity, then rolled over and fell asleep. No surprise, but still Helen felt bitterly dissatisfied.
2
Helen’s life in Sparta fell into a wearying, dull routine. Most of the time she was kept inside the citadel, like a royal captive, closely watched and guarded against the eyes of other men. Yet her husband allowed her to attend the feasts when important visitors came to the citadel. Menalaos would sit her at his side and grasp her wrist possessively. Thus she met ambassadors from Athens and Thebes and even far-off Crete. They all remarked wonderingly of her beauty.
“Am I not the most fortunate of men?” her husband would boast to his noble kinfolk and the visiting dignitaries, leering at Helen between cups of honey-sweetened wine. “Gaze upon my wife and see for yourselves how the gods have favored me.”
Yet when they were in bed together he barely spoke a word to her beyond the grunting of his clumsy, pawing passion. In truth, Helen had little to say to him, for whenever she did try to speak to him he either ignored her or commanded her to be silent. Helen fell into long, tearful bouts of desperation, seeing nothing in her life but dreary, meaningless years of misery.
“Be steadfast, my nursling,” I would tell her. “Soon enough you will have children to cheer your days.”
Yet she did not conceive, and I began to wonder if the gods had indeed marked her to be barren. Or was it Menalaos that the gods were punishing?
If I had not been there to comfort Helen, I fear she would have gone mad. She prayed to Aphrodite and to Hera, patroness of motherhood, that bearing Menalaos a child would change his attitude toward her. And her prayers were answered! She became pregnant at last. But when she gave birth, her baby was a daughter and Menalaos was furious.
“I want a son,” he snarled at her as she lay exhausted and sweaty in her labor bed.
He would not even look at their daughter. He ordered her taken from Helen and given to a wet nurse. When she tried to protest he sneered, “You can suckle me, instead.”
For days Helen begged him for her baby. Even when she was strong enough to get up from bed he refused to let her see her daughter. Then I discovered why, listening to the whispers of the serving women by the well in the citadel’s courtyard.
I rushed to Helen’s side, tears streaming from my eyes.
“Apet, what is it?” she asked.
I could not speak. Instead I raked my cheeks with my fingernails and flung myself on the stones of the hearth.
Helen dropped to her knees beside me, her whole body trembling. “Apet, what is wrong?”
I could only utter a strangled groan.
And she knew. “My baby!”
“Dead,” I choked out. “Left on the mountaintop for the wolves and crows.”
Helen screamed and tore her hair. The two of us wept uncontrollably, huddled together at the hearth, until long after the sun went down and the chill of night filled the bedchamber.
Menalaos did not come to her that night. Nor the next. When at last he did Helen stood by their bed fully dressed as I hid behind the halfshut door to her dressing closet with a dagger in my hand, ready to kill her husband if he struck her.
“Where is my daughter?” Helen demanded of Menalaos.
“She was sickly,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “Too weak to live.”
