Had I been six years old, and newly come from a primitive rock, I would have thought the lions frozen where they fought, forced to stand forever with fangs bared and claws drawn. I knew now that the hand of man had sculpted them. And yet the lions had such strength I could readily believe that one day they would leap down and tear to pieces those who tried to pass beneath them.
That night I met the lion.
Her name was Helen.
O Helen.
Think of hot gold infused on icy silver.
Think of a soft blue sky over an iron-hard sea.
The warmest sun and the coldest marble.
Helen. Swan and goddess.
But Menelaus did not notice. He gave his wife a mild hug, as if she were his sister. She in turn smiled briefly and returned to her embroidery. Her yarn was green shot through with sun, like the sea underwater. Elderly maids sat by her side, on stools so low their knees touched their chins, and threaded her needle for her.
Menelaus boxed fondly with his older sons, Aethiolas and Maraphius, who looked about ten and twelve. They were hopping up and down with the joy of having their father home. “Don't go anywhere without us next time, Father.”
“Let's go hunting, Father!”
“We've trained new dogs, Father! Wait till you see.”
“Father, let's—” and they had a great list of things to do together: wrestling, chariot racing, ball games, hunting boars, running the hounds.
Menelaus tossed his baby boy Pleisthenes into the air and a cascade of giggles came from the pretty child.
With Hermione, a fragile copy of her beautiful mother, the king was gentle, but Hermione was as wildly excited as her brothers. “I'm so glad you're home, Father!” she cried, wrapping her arms around him and tugging on his flaming beard. “I missed you so. Nobody else will play checkers or pegs or kings with me.”
“That's because you can't bear to lose,” said her father affectionately. “And nobody but me can tolerate your tears.”
“I've outgrown tears,” said Hermione haughtily. “I have not cried at the end of a board game in months.”
“Because you haven't played in months, Hermione,” said her brother Maraphius. “You're still a crybaby.”
Hermione flew at her brother, her frail fists as effective as dust kittens.
Helen's long slender fingers searched among the bright yarns spilling out of a silver basket. How fair of skin Helen was. Like the last mother and daughter I had known, Helen and Hermione seemed never to have been under the sun, which was what kept their skin white, but would also keep their lives dull. I expected that they had never seen a swan either, nor trembled in a forest, nor drunk warm milk from a pail.
For the boys, Menelaus brought out sets of toy Trojan soldiers, with shields and spears and even toy greyhounds and horses and chariots.
For Hermione, the king had chosen strange top heavy dolls. I did not like them.
Hecuba, queen of Troy, whose name I liked, for it had to do with moons and arrows, had sent Hermione a miniature tiara: roses, leaves and thorns beaten out of gold. Hermione's nurse set it gently on the little princess's head and laced her hair through it.
For Helen, Menelaus had brought a silver rimmed bathtub. It was high and round, just enough room for one person to sit with her knees drawn up as warm water was poured down over her shoulders, to make a lake around her so she might relax her tired limbs. Helen did not look like a person who ever did enough to be that tired. In any event, she hardly glanced at the silver bath, but took another stitch.
The day I was brought to Siphnos, Nicander had forgotten about me, but Menelaus was a greater king and forgot nothing. He took my hand tenderly. “This,” said Menelaus, “is a little lost princess. Her name is Callisto. Her father, King Nicander of Siphnos, was killed by pirates as she watched and her mother, Queen Petra, was made a slave, while the palace burned to the ground.”
“Oh, how sad!” said Hermione, rushing over to kiss and sorrow with me. “You saw it happen? Callisto, how dreadful. I am glad you are here where it is safe.”
“Callisto will be a sister to you, Hermione,” said Menelaus. “She will play pegs or kings with you.”
I was stunned. Nicander had explained to his family that I was a hostage whose value was gone…but this king announced that I was a sister.
And because of my lies.
Hermione clapped so gently that her hands made no sound. “I have two wonderful girl cousins,” she confided. “Iphigenia and Electra. They were here all last summer. I loved them. But they aren't coming this year. I'm so glad to have you instead. You must sleep in my room so we never have to stop talking.”
“I would be honored to sleep in your room, princess.”
“Oh, good. How old are you? I'm nine. Your hair is beautiful but you wear it so plain. Do the ladies on your island not braid their hair?”
I ignored the question about my age. “My mother the queen liked my hair loose. She said it looked like rose petals.”
Helen paused in her needlework. Everyone in the room—family, squires, maids, noblemen awaiting assignments—was aware of the change in her. I realized suddenly that the courtiers and servants in this large room had hardly been aware of the touching reunion between father and his children. They watched only Helen. They breathed in her rhythm and looked where her eyes looked.
I too felt the god in her and ached for her approval. When she turned and looked at me at last, an uncertain smile fluttered inside my mouth, eager to jump out and spread my lips and show my joy. I was breathless waiting for her permission to be happy.
“We once entertained Petra and Nicander,” said Helen. Her voice had no inflection. It had no wrath, it had no sympathy, it had nothing. It was merely air. “Petra and Nicander attended a festival at our temple of Apollo. They were dark haired.” Helen looked me up and down as one examines a slave on the table. The courtiers looked me up and down as one examines a slave on the table. My smile stuck inside.
“Usually,” she said, “a child resembles one of her parents.”
Fear sucked on me like an octopus.
“None of us has red hair, Mother,” Hermione pointed out. “You would think with four children at least one of us would have Father's hair.”
“How old are you, girl?” said Helen. Her face showed no more emotion than a statue. The god part of her was made of stone, not swan.
“I am fifteen,” I said. “I know I look younger. I had much illness as a child.”
“Are you betrothed?” Hermione wanted to know.
“I am not.”
“How strange,” said Helen. Her eyes hooked mine, as a sharp hook will fasten to a fish. “A king's only child is fifteen years of age and yet that king arranged no betrothal?”
She was right, of course. It was unheard of. What king would allow chance to decide his heir? I could not explain that since Callisto was crippled and likely to be barren, no one wanted her, because now I was Callisto.
I said nothing, and it was the right course, for Helen had arrived at a favorite topic. “I myself at fifteen,” said Helen, her voice growing rich and pleased, “had a palace full of suitors.”
She was famous for those suitors. There had been so many eager to wed her. As men in athletic competition will become fierce, trying to prove day after day who is strongest and best, so the suitors turned to dueling. Helen's earthly father, the old king of Sparta, did an extraordinary thing to stop the suitors from killing each other. He brought forth his finest stallion, sliced its throat, and made every suitor stand in the blood of the horse. Then they had to swear the most terrible oath known in our times: that the man Helen chose in marriage would forever have the loyalty of all the rest.
The sacrifice of a horse was shocking, because men do not eat horse meat, and a sacrifice is also a feast, and every citizen will partake in the great meal that follows. To make a horse holy is very powerful and strange, as its meat will not be put upon the coals. It must be buried, and the earth around
it becomes sacred.
I had heard bards sing about the oath of the horse as many times as I had heard them sing of Jason and the Golden Fleece. I never liked thinking of those young men with their bare feet soaked in blood, but when I looked at Helen, I imagined something more terrible: Helen watching them.
Now she watched me.
The room watched me.
“Recite for me,” said Helen, “the genealogy of Petra.”
I froze like the boy in Nicander's courtyard. I could not remember one name from that family not my own.
“Petra was distantly related to me,” said Helen. “We share the same grandmother five generations back.”
Desperation pierced my heart and spread outward into my limbs, as one poisoned by hemlock would die. I clung to my magic jar. I wet my lips.
But it was not magic that saved me. It was a real princess.
“Isn't that good news, Callisto?” cried Hermione. “You and I are cousins then. But I am so sad for you. Your dear father dead and your mother now a slave.” Hermione pointed to the maid on Helen's left, a very old woman, hair of silver, hands gnarled and trembling, cheeks wrinkled like last year's apple. One eye was white with the blindness that seals up the sight of the very old. She held her sewing up close to her good eye. She had an enormous workbasket to complete. “Aethra was once a queen,” Hermione said. “She belongs to Mother now.”
A queen. Hemming sheets instead of resting on them.
“Yes,” said Helen. She was pleased at the sight of a queen brought low. “My dear brothers Castor and Pollux brought Aethra to me.” Helen put her wool into the silver basket. “Fetch my other embroidery, Aethra. It's upstairs.”
The slave woman's stool was low and her body old and stiff. Aethra struggled to her feet. Helen watched brighteyed, as if enjoying jugglers or gymnasts. When the old queen had made it out of the room, her swollen fingers touching the wall for balance, Helen turned toward me again in her slow considering way. Hers was a remarkably still face, as if halfway between living and dead. “When Queen Petra visited, she told me of the crippled state of her daughter. She showed me the lock of her daughter's hair that she planned to set on the altar of Apollo. It was black.”
“You've just gotten Petra and Nicander mixed up with somebody else, Mother,” said Hermione.
I should have accepted Axon, I thought. I said, “And Apollo answered her prayers, O queen, for I am no longer crippled.”
The baby boy had been set down. He toddled with the headlong dash of the very small child who cannot stop except by falling. I swung him up to kiss him, praying I could distract Helen. “Hello, Pleisthenes,” I said. A long name for a little boy, but it means “strength,” and such a virtue requires many syllables.
He beamed at me.
“My name is Callisto,” I said to the little boy. The name did not come easily to my tongue. I knew Helen knew I was lying. Because she's half god, I thought. The seeing half.
“We call him Pleis,” Hermione told me, poking a sharp finger into her brother's ribs to make him squeal with laughter. “He's just starting to talk. He can say about ten words. Pleis,” she crooned, “this is Callisto. Say ‘Calli,’ Pleis.”
The baby grabbed one of my curls and chewed on it. “Calli,” he said softly. His chubby arms tightened around my neck and he gave me a wet squashy kiss. My heart flew into his. I loved him.
“Isn't this nice?” said Menelaus in a deep domestic voice. He did not seem a warrior or king. He was just a father, glad to be home, slouched on puffy pillows, watching his children play.
Pleis' clumsy little fingers found the magic jar. “You can't have this,” I said to him. “You might put it in your mouth.”
“What is it?” said Hermione, interested.
“A magic jar. Your father the king bought it for me.”
Menelaus laughed. “It's just glass. A trinket from the bazaar. Helen, we will have Callisto as another daughter until she weds.”
“We will not,” said the queen. Her voice was bored and final, as a mistress refusing permission to a slave. She did not bother to glance at me.
“Now, Helen,” said her husband, paying just as little attention to her as to a slave. He was half-asleep against soft pillows. Hermione curled up next to him.
The slightest expression touched Helen's smooth face. I could not read it. “I am curious, Menelaus, my husband. Why do you wish to treat this unknown girl as a daughter? This girl with red hair like your own. Is she your daughter, Menelaus? You who sail the wide seas for months at a time? You who could have any woman from any isle and I would not be the wiser?”
I dropped my magic jar. The vendor had been right. When it fell on the tiled floor, it split into shards. Pleis was entranced by the sharp shiny pieces and wiggled to get down.
“Now, Helen,” said Menelaus, as if she had disagreed with a dinner menu. “Of course not.” He gestured to a slave to clean up the broken glass. He yawned and closed his eyes again.
“The isle of Siphnos is out of your way, Menelaus. From Troy, you would sail to Antissa, you would cross the Aegean Sea to Euboea, and then proceed down the coast to Gythion.”
“Now, Helen. A ship doesn't control its route as easily as that. Strong wind swept us south the moment we left Troy. We weren't able to cross the Aegean Sea in the north. The winds didn't favor us until we reached Samos.” He sat up a little, speaking to his daughter instead of his wife. “On the isle of Samos, they worship the goddess Hera,” he told Hermione. “All Hera's statues are copper. Her sanctuary is guarded by peacocks. I brought you tail feathers from the peacock. They're as tall as you are. Green and indigo and sparkling silver.”
“Oooooh, lovely,” said Hermione. “Let's get them right now.”
“I'm too tired. The slaves will bring them in the morning.”
As a summer storm rolls over the sky and fills the air with dark anger, so Helen changed from statue to woman. “And Siphnos?” she said sharply.
I had been in her palace but a few hours, and already I knew that with her husband, the daughter of a god had to raise her voice to get attention.
The room shifted uneasily.
“Now, Helen,” said Menelaus patiently. “From Samos we wove our way east. That part of the Aegean is so full of islands it's hardly even sailing, it's just paddling from one shore to another. By chance we saw a burned citadel and stopped to see. On the shore, guarding the grave she dug for Nicander, was this brave and true little princess. Naturally I brought her home with me.”
Helen twitched her gown as a stalking cat flicks its tail. The great piece of wool she was embroidering fell open on the floor. I was awestruck. From her needle had spilled wild birds and cascading roses, glittering suns and trailing vines, arching lilies and proud stags. I yearned for her to be pleased with me. I wanted to sit by her, to study how she created such beauty, to hand her the wool of her choice and cut the threads with my own knife.
But Helen whirled on me. “How did it happen, girl, that you alone survived such a brutal attack? A king died, yet you lived? An entire town died, yet you escaped? Did you walk away from your destiny? Were you meant to die?”
But Menelaus had not been listening. “Helen, my dear, sing for me, won't you? I have missed your voice.”
“Yes, Mother, sing!” cried Hermione. “I want Callisto to hear you. Callisto,” she told me, “you have never heard a voice like my mother's.”
Hermione was correct. Helen's voice rang low and ominous like distant thunder. She flicked a torrent of notes off a golden lyre while long angry syllables poured from her throat.
They came armed, the suitors,
To see the daughter of the swan.
They fought each other, the suitors,
In duels and to the death,
From a stallion sired by the wind,
Blood poured forth.
With their feet in the wet hot blood They stood, the suitors.
And they swore, the suitors.
For love of Helen.
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They swore.
I had expected a typical ladies' lament. Let me love the cry of the lyre; let me soothe with my lullaby; that sort of thing.
When Helen had finished the song, she folded her eyes down, as the eyes of a lion will lower when it has eaten its kill and is sated. She seemed to be within that long ago circle of suitors, reveling in their desire for her. I knew she remembered every aching glance, every heaving chest and reaching hand.
“That was lovely, dear,” said the king sleepily. “It's nice to be home. Although actually they swore for my sake, as you will recall. Since I am the husband you chose.”
Helen's eyes opened very wide. She regarded Menelaus as a lion regards prey.
THE CELEBRATION WELCOMING Menelaus lasted for days. But grateful as the people were to Menelaus, it was Helen they loved.
How the multitudes hoped for the privilege of her smile, the sound of her voice, the light touch of her hand in praise. She glided among her people like a swan on the Evrotas River. Her shining hair was pulled up into a cup of beaten gold, and below the gold hung one very thick braid, woven with gold threads. Her earrings were puffy gold biscuits and her necklace a gold filigree.
Her face stayed still. You could read no prophecy, understand no mystery, looking at that smooth facade. But neither could you take your eyes away.
People said there had been a contest once among goddesses to see who was the most beautiful. People said goddesses came in second. Helen was first.
I believed it.
I stayed clear of Helen, having remembered only three generations of Callisto's genealogy. Since I did end up sleeping in Hermione's room, I was afraid Helen would be all too aware of me. But Helen turned out to be aware only of herself. Every day, it took the entire morning for her maids to prepare her hair and complexion, adjust her gown and jewelry, paint her toenails and shadow her eyes. Helen kept her apartments sweet smelling, anointing the pillars with scented oils, rubbing mint against the plaster walls and lavender over her robes. The air around Helen was rich and dusty.
Hermione's room was large and four maids slept on her floor.