The Hittite - Ben Bova [49]
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