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The sun’s rim blazed still over the top of Mount Ida, its slopes and forests sunk in shadow, so the wedding procession winding its way to the city from the near shore of the Scamander looked like a piece of the sun, broken off and tossed, filament-like, down to earth. Some of the women in the procession carried torches. Others bore flower wreaths and baskets from which phalluses carved from wood – some meticulously detailed, with curling hair like sea waves cut into the bottoms, while others were cruder, mere sticks with a circular hollow cut into the wood at one end to denote the head and a second slash for the piss slit – protruded like so many loaves of bread, fat and big as the pizzles of divine bulls, to bring good luck to the couple being wed.

The women sang and laughed as they walked from flowing water and looming mountain back to the city, while boys and unwed youths capered around them, playing pipes and drums, the music and the shouting, singing voices wild with merriment, resonant like the clash of arms, so that the procession resembled an invading army in the gathering darkness, like Bacchus himself had come to bless this union.

Hector, the eldest son of King Priam and the noblest of all of Troy’s princes, living or dead, waited upon the dais raised in the center of his city, showing every semblance of patience and calm to the assembled throng of men, Trojans and Achaeans alike, who had come to witness his marriage. His bride approached at the head of the women bearing flowers and phalluses, veiled like any demure Greek wife but dressed in nothing but a hunting net and her own great beauty, or so the rumor fleeing across the Trojan plain ahead of the wedding procession would have had it.

It had been Agamemnon’s idea to have the marriage consummated in public.

“You know what Spartan women are like: they sport together in public yet act proud as peacocks around men,” Agamemnon had said to Priam and Hector, his smile as thin as a dagger slash, for all the world as though they had not been negotiating the end of a war but the purchase of a dancing girl at a slave auction. “After nine years of men going down to Hades for her sake, it is only fitting we all get a good look at the prize we’ve bled for.”

The fact that Helen’s two husbands, the fair Paris and Menelaus, the King of Sparta, had died fighting each other in single combat half a year earlier remained unspoken, yet Agamemnon’s point was clear: both men who had borne witness to all of Helen’s charms had gone to dust. Theseus, her first husband, was long dead too. They could hardly raise any objections. Hector could not help wondering at the coldness in Agamemnon that seemed to delight in the prospect of humiliating his dead brother’s wife more than he mourned the brother himself.

With no war to fight after nine long years, Hector found himself ill-suited to the business of governing and so let his father lead the negotiations. And Priam, possessed still of immense dignity despite the war’s ravages on him and his people, had replied to Agamemnon, in a voice shaking with more anger than shame, that the Achaeans were already getting a third of Troy’s subject cities, and a share in Troy’s trade networks in the lands of the Hittites and the Persians, and annual tribute in gold, silver, and slaves. They were winning this war in every way save the one that bards could sing of and warriors boast of.

The thorny question of what to do with Helen of Sparta came down to no one in the Greek army wanting the duty and the burden of taking her home. Through all the suffering her presence in his city had brought to his people, old Priam refused to treat Helen as anything less than a daughter, and a cherished one at that. The fragile truce between Troy and Achaea balanced on the tip of a blade, the room where negotiations took place bristling with unarmed men who thirsted still for battle, when the princess Cassandra and her twin brother Helenus spoke up with one voice from the back of the crowded chamber to claim the gods agreed with Agamemnon. The seer Calchas agreed with them, though not till after all eyes turned to him. So Trojan and Argive seers stood united with Troy’s enemy, and still Priam refused to give the King of Mycenae his cruel heart’s desire.

“We shall send word to Delphi,” King Priam said. “As the Pythia says, so it shall be.”

Hector did not hide his smile at his father’s cleverness as Priam rose from his chair, ending negotiations for the nonce. Still seated, Agamemnon looked ready to argue, but he too could see the game the old king played: Delphi was an ally of Sparta and always had been. If the Pythia agreed with Priam’s children and Calchas, the gods’ blessing on this marriage would give Troy the right in this negotiated peace, despite all the concessions Agamemnon had wrested for himself and his allies. And if the Pythia – and through her, Helen’s father Zeus – said no to this marriage, well: then the great Agamemnon, head of the House of Atreus, commander of one thousand Greek ships, would be made to look a fool in front of his own combined forces and those of his enemies.

When he did not sit at his father’s right-hand side while Priam haggled with the Greeks over trade routes and tribute, Hector filled his days with supervising repairs to the city and drilling the surviving Trojan youths in mock battles with sword and spear. He tried not to think of the prospect of marrying Helen. He had been happy with Andromache and had grieved truly when she’d set sail for Thebes, so that Hector, as Priam’s eldest and Troy’s finest warrior, could wed Helen and put an end to this war’s root cause. For nine years he had followed his father’s example and always treated Helen kindly, even as most of Troy soured against her beauteous presence while their sons and husbands died in battle over her. Hector had made a habit of not thinking about Helen much, or what her presence in the city meant for them all. He was resolute not to think of her some more, while letters were sent to Delphi and back.

On the day when Agamemnon made his demand, Hector met Cassandra on his way out of the chamber where negotiations took place. As always, she wore her hair down and was dressed more like a beggar than a princess, with dirt under her fingernails.

Hector put his arm around her thin shoulders and matched his stride to hers. “How fares the day, little sister?” he asked.

Cassandra looked up into his face, but her eyes seemed not to see him. Hector was used to this and to Cassandra speaking her own truths rather than answer any question posed to her.

“The House of Atreus is rotten from threshold to hearth,” she said in a happy singsong, smiling brightly at Hector. “Blood he has sown, and blood he shall reap once he is home.”

Hector realized that Cassandra’s fingernails were not dirty with soil, but crushed mulberries. She must have raided the tree in the palace garden before sneaking in to listen to the negotiations. Her teeth as she smiled at him were black with the ripe fruit.

He thought of this as the din of cymbals and pipes and drums entered the city and wound its way to the dais on the square at its center, where market day was held and poets competed against each other in the daytime, and the sky over them all – Achaean and Trojan, men and women, young and old – turned the color of ripe mulberries and was studded with stars. The Pythia had spoken, and so Hector had no choice but to lift up his chin, stand straight in his new chiton and long cloak, and train his eyes over the river of light, which was the torch-bearing women bringing him his bride.

Helen ascended the dais, accompanied by Hector’s sister Polyxena in her priestess’ garb and Agamemnon’s woman Chryseis as the closest thing to a Greek woman to be found on the east shore of the sea. Chryseis seemed abashed by the duty to deliver Helen to her bridegroom, but Polyxena caught Hector’s eye and winked. She may have chosen to become a priestess of Apollo, but Polyxena too would witness Hector’s union with Helen, for she too had become a hero to her people – once he knew that he could not have her, the mighty Achilles had sailed home empty-handed and wounded in his pride. Soon thereafter, Paris had killed Menelaus and been killed in turn, leaving Agamemnon no options save a siege without end or a negotiated peace.

Much like this marriage, the war’s end will give no one precisely what they want, Hector thought as he lowered his gaze from where he’d been staring over the three women’s heads and the assembled crowd below the dais, to the deeper darkness of Mount Ida beyond. He lowered his gaze to look at his bride at last, and then his thoughts ground to a halt like a chariot with no horse to draw it.

Helen’s blond curls were covered in a bride’s proper veil, and she held a wreath of wildflowers in her hands. Her form was swathed in fold after fold of finely woven net, much finer than anything one might trap fish or a lion in. Hector could glimpse the curve of a breast, the white of a thigh through the net. This close, he saw also the fine lines by Helen’s eyes, at the corners of her lips, as well as the assessing look in her blue-grey eyes. Fleetingly he wondered what she must see in his face, what trace the nine years of war had left in him.

Helen of Sparta, of Troy, the world’s most beautiful woman, daughter of a god and widow of three kings and princes before him, watched Hector of Troy like she was challenging him to a contest for which one of them could jump farther or hurl a javelin better. She had always watched him like that, for all the nine years she had lived in Troy, and so Hector had grown accustomed to watching the top of her fair head rather than look her in the eye, while paying her every courtesy and departing her company at the first opportunity.

They faced each other on the dais, with a makeshift bed covered in crimson cloth beside them. Polyxena and Chryseis walked around the couple thrice, going in opposite directions, binding them into a circle they could not leave, before they descended into the waiting crowd and were swallowed up by the wine-dark, torchlight-licked sea of upturned faces.

Music still played, and the watching crowd shifted and sighed beneath the dais and all around it, like the sea coming in at high tide, washing up the beach to where the Achaean ships waited to take the survivors home on the morrow. A restlessness ran through the watchers, like horses pawing the ground, like warriors waiting for the command to attack. All weapons were banned from the wedding celebration, but the mass of bodies thronging the square, jostling each other for a better view of the dais, carried a dense quality of menace all its own.

They’ll tear us apart and devour our flesh raw, Hector thought, and suddenly he wished for a sword in his hand, or a short spear, or even a shepherd’s club – something he might use to defend himself and… her? And her. His bride and himself both.

Helen laid the wreath of wildflowers on his hair. Hector had heard that she had crowned Menelaus thus, marking him out among all her suitors and claiming him as her own, years ago in Sparta. Was that a smile of mockery she gave Hector now, while cymbals clashed and the crowd grew more restless still?

“Get on with it!” a male voice shouted to Hector’s left.

Hector would have sworn he recognized Agamemnon’s voice, but before anyone could pick up the rallying cry and goad the crowd and the newlyweds further, a high, thin, cackling sound Hector recognized rose from the opposite side of the dais: Cassandra was laughing, laughing at the King of Mycenae, laughing at the Achaeans and the Trojans both, and the crowd subsided in confusion, if only for a few moments. Only the dull pounding of the drums remained to underscore the crackle of torches which illuminated the scene.

Torchlight played on Helen’s face as she motioned with her hands like a sorceress, then the net she wore dropped off her like the skin off a snake and she emerged, Aphrodite in human form, her breasts round and ripe and sagging, her belly and thighs striped like a tiger’s skin with many pregnancies, the tangle of blond hair between her legs an invitation and a challenge.

Hector remembered to shut his mouth as he looked down then back up her body, to her calm eyes, no challenge in them now, though her lips still twisted in a semblance of a mocking smile. Hector swallowed. He had avoided looking at her for nine years. He had loved Andromache with everything he had. There was no escaping now.

Helen touched his chest, reached for the clasp holding the cloak under his chin. The heavy cloak sighed down around their feet, and the crowd roused itself again, like a bear scenting prey. “Fuck her already!” many voices shouted. “Put her on her hands and knees so we can see her!” a rough voice with an Ionian accent demanded. “Make her weep, my husband died for her!” a Trojan woman called out. The voices lapped each other, furious and greedy: My brother, my father, all three of my sons died because of her… Helen’s hands did not tremble as they grasped the bottom hem of Hector’s chiton. She seemed deaf to the crowd’s roars.

Nineteen of Hector’s brothers had died in this war, killed in battle by one Greek or another, year after year. Hector seized Helen by the wrists, firmly but not so as to hurt her, and she looked up into his eyes, and she smiled, and she pressed her palms against his chest and pushed. He let her push him backward, onto the crimson bed, lay back and let her climb on top of him and lift his chiton up his thighs. She grazed her cunt, wet as a split fruit, against him. Hector swallowed an oath, wondering if the rumors about the rites with which women worshipped Bacchus were true and the women who’d delivered Helen to him had also made her ready for him.

“Ready to do your duty once again,” Helen said, less a question than a statement, the first thing she’d said to him since before their marriage was first announced.

Something flared in Hector then, flared up in his chest and his belly like a flaming arrow shot high to signal the start of a nighttime raid, and he seized her hips and pushed up inside her. The flower wreath tumbled off his head and was crushed under their grappling bodies, the scent of a summer noon briefly filling the night. Helen laughed like a Maenad, and the crowd roared like a forest fire. Their demands and suggestions, often clashing and each one filthier than the last, crashed over Hector. He felt like he was drowning in the Scamander, the river swollen with melted snow. Helen’s breasts goaded him, her hands caressed him, her ripeness clenched around him. He imagined his father and mother watching him rut with Helen under the open sky, Polyxena and Cassandra and Agamemnon, all of his surviving brothers and sisters and all the Greek warriors he hadn’t had a chance to kill, all watching them, cheering them on, calling on Hector to split the bitch in half to satisfy them, their greed and lust and the grief of all their losses. Over Helen’s shoulder, he could see the Dioscuri blazing in the night sky – even Helen’s brothers Castor and Pollux had come to her wedding, and were watching this too.

Hector wrapped his right arm, his sword arm, around Helen’s waist and made to turn them over on the bed, so his body would cover hers and hide her from the crowd, but Helen pushed him back down, both hands planted on his chest, muscles standing out along her arms, surprising him with her strength. A woman of Sparta, nearly a warrior.

“No,” Helen breathed, no longer smiling. “Or they won’t leave it at this.” She squeezed her eyes shut like she was concentrating and undulated on top of Hector, pushed herself down on him harder, panting. “Give me more.”

What could he do but obey?

He curved his hands around her waist and guided her down as he thrust up to meet her, and lifted his head to suck on her breasts – he was her fourth husband: such opportunities did not come to men often and were dearly paid for always – as she folded those strong arms of hers around his neck, and swore and babbled in his ear till her voice, breathless and demanding, was all he could hear. Hector bent his knees, lifting them both, and spilled in her, wondering if the crowd could see his thighs tremble, his balls drawn up tight to his body. Helen rode him harder still, her breasts swaying under her tumbled hair, and stroked her hand down her breast, her belly, to where they were joined, and gasped and shuddered her fill while Hector watched her by torchlight and thought that for nine years he’d slept with Andromache in his chamber and never once heard anything through the wall of polished stone separating him from the adjoining chamber, Paris’s chamber, despite listening more intently than he ever would have admitted. The thought of his dead brother barely touched him while Helen moaned and shuddered, displaying her pleasure to the assembled crowd with no sign she even remembered they were there, watching, till finally she lay down on Hector’s chest, shaking like one mortally wounded. Hector crossed her back with one arm, cradled her head in his other hand, the proper bride’s veil barely clinging to her sweaty curls, and thought the crowd could not see much now – a knee, a thigh, her blond tresses spilling everywhere. Only the torches still crackled and people breathed and shuffled quietly around them; even the drums had fallen silent.

When Hector raised himself on his elbow and looked around, Helen raising her head to look too, the crowd was scattering from the square, in twos and threes and small groups, going as meekly as tired revelers after a festival with games and sacrifices and poetry competitions. Many pairs of eyes glanced back at the dais, glanced away swiftly if they happened to meet Hector’s eye and, he imaged, Helen’s too. He spotted Cassandra, her long hair as dark as night, helping their mother and father back to the palace – the mad princess playing the dutiful daughter, while Priam’s eldest son lay spent as a circus dancer with his bride in the middle of the empty square. Had he been less bone-tired after the past nine years and now this madness, Hector might have laughed.

He woke to his chamber bathed in golden light. Slaves had appeared from the darkness between the guttering torches – had they watched the consummation too? – and wrapped him and Helen in long cloaks, given them cups of wine to revive them, then guided them to the palace through the silent streets. Hector had collapsed on his bed, refusing to think of where Helen would sleep or aught else before sleep claimed him.

Now he saw that rose-fingered dawn would not spare him the reality of his marriage, like it would a bad dream, for Helen stood, her back to the bed, by the oak-wood stand on which Hector’s breastplate hung, his great helm with the long horsehair crest perched on top, his armguards, his belt and scabbard, and his long spear tipped with bronze arranged around it. Hector had never noticed before how much the arrangement seemed a parody of a human being, haphazard of limb and empty of muscle and brain to give it purpose.

Helen was naked, her long hair spilling down her back, her hips wide and matronly in the morning light. The sunlight on her hair picked out silver threads in the gold, but her small, white hand was unmarred by creeping age as she stroked her fingers over the breastplate before grasping the end of the spear shaft. She touched it not teasingly, like a young girl might have done, nor with obscene knowledge and intent, but grasped it as one used to wielding weapons, and Hector remembered – though he had never truly forgotten – that Helen had hunted and wrestled and run in footraces in her Spartan youth, before and perhaps even after her face began to turn men’s heads and she began to bear children to one husband after another.

He had no notion of what to say to her, and was spared her turning and catching him in the act of observing her by the entrance of slaves bearing oil to scrub them with and clean clothes to dress them in. The Achaean party would depart Troy that morning, and the married couple could not be absent from the full complement of Trojan survivors seeing their enemies off.

The sun was well past its zenith before all the Greeks left the city and went to their ships, there to sacrifice a hundred oxen provided by the Trojans, to speed them on their journeys home. Agamemnon’s compliments to King Priam and his children went on for a long time and veered often close to mockery. The necessity of standing by and bearing it all vexed Hector sore, but what could he do? He stood by Helen’s side and looked Agamemnon in the eye when it was their turn to exchange barbed compliments, and the King of Mycenae knew just enough to swallow whatever insult he had reserved for his brother’s widow and her new husband. Then on down the line of Trojan princes he went, till he passed with the briefest nod by the children and the unwed girls, and then a ripple raced back up the Trojan line, a collective held breath, for most of the assembled had heard someone blow a loud raspberry at proud Agamemnon.

“Who has spoken?” Priam’s voice reached Hector as though from far away. His father sounded like a fretful old man for the first time that Hector could remember. “What is it?”

Cassandra had made the noise. She watched Agamemnon coyly, chewing a hank of her wild hair, and the King of Mycenae returned her gaze like he wanted to break all her teeth even more than he wanted the Trojan tribute and trade networks he’d gained as war booty.

Then someone – wise old Nestor, or wily Odysseus, perhaps – cleared their throat, and Agamemnon jerked away, turning his head like Cassandra was too lowly for him to notice, and moved on, down the palace steps and toward the open gate of the city. No one moved till the Greeks were well away and the gate barred behind them, then a sigh went through the assembled Trojans and they began to scatter, some to the kitchens, and some to the loom and the distaff, and some to go over accounts and begin the unending business of peacetime government. They’d scattered thus the previous night, like seeds from a sower’s hand.

Cassandra wandered past, arm in arm with young Polydorus. “The eighth day of a moon phase is auspicious for sowing crops,” Cassandra said to her youngest brother, who could not have cared less about such things.

Hector started and stared at his sister, but she was not looking at him, nor at Helen, intent on her own hidden realities. Then Polydorus tapped her on the arm, cried “You’re it!” and they raced off into the cool shadowed corridors of the palace, crying like seagulls.

Hector and Helen stood on the palace steps alone. Hector watched Mount Ida across the empty market square – the dais had been dismantled some time before the Greeks’ solemn departure – across the rooftops and the city wall.

He started down the steps, not knowing whither he was bound, when Helen spoke up behind him: “Will it be another nine years before you dare to look me in the eye again, husband?”

Hector wished for his sword, his spear, a dagger, or even an empty flagon of thick silver, then recalled that only cursèd man struck their wives so. He lengthened his stride and ground his teeth, lest curses should pour forth from his lips.

In no time at all, he was by the eastern wall, where it was least defensible and where the fig tree grew, as though to mark the spot of the city’s greatest weakness. Thanks be to the gods who loved Troy, to Apollo and Zeus and Aphrodite, that the Achaeans had never besieged the city entirely, or Troy might have held out for nine months rather than nine years.

A small, white hand seized Hector’s bicep with no hope of interrupting his stride, but he stopped anyway. He whirled around so Helen fell back a step as he crowded her, under the fig leaves and small green fruits.

“We performed, for your people and for mine, lady,” Hector said. “Now you may go about your amusements, as you have been wont to do.”

Helen narrowed her eyes the color of the sea at him. “You were always kind to me, when you were only my brother, even if you couldn’t look at me. I thought you and your good father may be the only people in this city to love me, toward the end. Was I wrong?”

Hector snatched his arm out of her grasp. “Will you turn your sights on my good father next, or will it satisfy you that most men, but not all, fall under your spell?”

Had she been a man, Helen would have struck him then, he saw. Fleetingly he wondered what wrestling a woman might be like, oiled skin to oiled skin and bare feet sliding on the gymnasium’s sandy floor.

“If the gods give a woman a pretty face and the skill to wield it, and they give all men a hankering for pretty faces, is the woman to blame?” Helen demanded, squeezing her fists by her sides. “If the gods decree that a woman is to be a man’s reward in exchange for a golden apple, is the woman to blame?”

Her sweet voice dripped poison like a serpent’s fang, and Hector wanted to crush her body to his, push her to the ground and mount her from behind. He wanted to drag her back to his chamber – their chamber now – and cover her body with his and hear her babble filth in his ear while she squeezed her arms around his neck, as she’d done on the dais.

Helen’s face was too close to his, he’d go blind at the sight.

“If a woman desires a man for herself, is the woman to blame?” she goaded him still.

“Yes!” Hector shouted. “Yes, she is to blame.”

Helen’s face tilted, she frowned. “And if the woman realizes that she chose poorly, and her desire for the man dwindles, but a stronger desire kindles inside her for another? And if that another is her husband’s brother, whom everyone loves and trusts to save them as though he were Apollo himself? And if she never speaks of it nor acts on it, but the gods play with her destiny like dice yet again and things turn out as they have? Is the woman still to blame?”

Her voice turned soft yet persistent, allowing no escape without an answer. Hector was reminded of his old tutor – an Assyrian slave who’d taught him astronomy and mathematics – nearly laughed at the idea of Helen teaching a group of unruly, willful young princes, with a willow switch in one hand and a writing tablet in the other.

“There is plenty of blame to go around,” Hector replied at last. He was a warrior with no war and the prince of a city much diminished, but he was no liar.

Helen watched him steadily, like a ship’s captain watching the horizon, then she turned and walked up to the city wall and laid her hand on its sun-warmed stone. “I am tired of being amused,” she murmured, her back to Hector. “It’s my city too, and the last thing it needs is for me to find still more pastimes.”

Hector felt no touch of the Muse on his brow, no chord from Apollo’s lyre in his heart, but he recognized inspiration regardless. He had never been a maker of song or verse, the music he made was the screams of men dying on the end of his sword, the complaints of the horses he tamed. He approached Helen, his feet quiet on the red soil under the fig tree.

“You learned to wield a spear when you were a girl, didn’t you?” Helen turned to look at him, frowning. “You hunted and wrestled?”

“Yes.” Helen’s smile turned mocking again. “I won an olive crown for wrestling when I was thirteen, after Theseus gave me back, though some didn’t want me to compete in case I’d already wrestled with a man and so was no longer a maiden pure.”

Hector was not swayed by her goading. “But you were not taught to fight others with spear or sword?” he asked.

“There is no greater honor for a Spartan woman than to give birth to warriors.” It sounded like something learned by heart, from a stern tutor of her own youth.

“When we have sons, I will teach them to fight and defend their city,” Hector said. He had no dove to hand to wring its neck, no bull to spill its blood on the earth, but he would make a sacrifice later, for this was an oath. “I will teach our daughters too.”

Helen’s lips parted, and her pupils grew round and large as a cat’s in the nighttime. She watched Hector unblinking, like a seer, something hidden opening up and showing itself to her.

Hector inclined his head to her, so he need not raise his voice but she would be certain to hear him. “And I will teach you, if you want it.”

Helen’s soft hand fell on his arm and gripped his hard, sunburned bicep like she was drowning.

“Yes,” she breathed, her eyes intent on Hector’s face, the color rising in her cheeks. “Oh yes.”