The Hittite - Ben Bova [50]
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.”
“Where is my daughter?” she repeated.
“I want a son.”
“Then go make a bastard with one of your serving wenches,” she said coldly. She seemed to be a statue of ice, showing no fear, no emotion what ever except hatred as hard as stone. Go ahead and strike me, she challenged him wordlessly. Beat me senseless. It makes no difference.
Menalaos raised his hand and took half a step toward