'I would fain have armed today, but my Nell would not have it so.'
Troilus and Cressida
A look inside the mind of Helen of Troy in the aftermath of Hector's demise.
Hector is dead.
At first it is a whisper; something the people of Troy would rather pass off as a rumour originating in the Greek camp, a complete untruth designed only to inspire terror within the Trojan walls.
It changes into a tearful sob, and the solitary voice of a soldier is heard, returning bloodied and bruised from the unfinished battle.
Then it becomes a death knell; a sound so loud that they can no longer ignore it, a sound taken up by the masses and carried to the walls of Ilium's palace.
A sound which breaks a father's heart and pushes a sister violently into the depths of insanity, upon whose edge she has teetered for so long.
A servant runs into the most decadent bed-chamber the palace has to offer, and stops dead at the scene which unfolds before him. He stares hard at the ground, and wishes for it to swallow him whole.
The bed is large and takes up most of the room, and the beauty of its decoration is eclipsed only by the figures writhing upon it; a couple who so encapsulate perfection that Aphrodite herself would worship at their shrine.
The prince lies on the bed, his mouth at the neck of his lover in a lust-filled caress. He senses the invasion and recovers himself effortlessly, checking the moan of "Nell…" which was about to leave his lips and then beckoning for its perpetrator to speak.
"Hector is dead."
Paris needs no other words from the servant; at these he turns, gives his supposed soulmate a brisk kiss, and leaves the room, pulling on his clothes as he goes.
She lies on the bed where he has left her; half-dressed, empty and abandoned, like the whore and honey she has been labelled as.
Her senses return to her slowly as the time of their thief's absence increases and he still does not return. She stares at her hands in a vague sort of horror, and wonders at their ability to perform such acts with another man while her husband is not only still alive, but living just outside the walls of the city. She uses her hands, those traitors of decency, to pick up a small mirror and stare at her face.
"Nell."
It is a stranger's face she looks upon, just as it is a stranger's name she whispers to herself. There is an absence of grief in this alien reflection, and she feels aghast at it.
As a child, she had been disciplined fiercely until she was able to mask her emotions completely. This was a good feature in a wife, she was promised. Her composure in Sparta was renowned and Prince Menelaus, won over by her earth-shattering beauty and seemingly pliant nature, fell for her as fast and hard as it was possible for a man to do. She did not return his love but a marriage into the royal family was everything her family had dreamt of for her, and so she used her gifts, and masked her apathy towards him. Her life from that point onwards was a stunning display of absolutely nothing as she moved through her daily tasks as the cold moon revolves around the earth, pulled along by the tide without any choice of its own.
And then Paris arrived, and she became the sun: a riot of flames and colour existing entirely of its own accord and trawling everyone along in her wake. If she thought about it now, she could not remember what drew her to him in the first place, except that the first glance they shared was akin to a knife in her stomach, and from that point forwards she could only truly feel something real in his presence. It felt like fate, and it was this which had drawn her away from the home she had always known.
She had realised later, as many before her had and many after her would, that the line between hate and love was a thin precipice upon which only the most experienced could tread without harming themselves. She was so long used to living life behind a veil that she could not cope with the extreme emotions now presented to her. Seven years slowly passed and each year increased the blood debt she owed to the gods, as more and more soldiers died for her mistake. She watched as her guilt poisoned everything in her world, and nothing more so than Paris. She grew to hate his easy nature, his saccharine ideologies and his flippancy in conversation; the way he stepped gracefully over the ground as though nothing could touch him; his refusal to mourn with her over the catastrophe they had created and, perhaps most of all, his habit of shortening her name to Nell. It was an ugly sound, and would only further remind her of the ugly deed they were committing together. She knows now that Nell should never have been brought into existence.
Jolted by this thought, she remembers Hector. Her throat constricts as the possibility of her folly causing his death becomes real. Her hands shake as she grasps blindly for her clothes, her fingers finding and adding a veil to her normal ensemble before she properly realises just what it is that she intends to do. She leaves the bed-chamber quickly, and stumbles a little as the bright midday sun in the passageway momentarily blinds her. She follows the light as best as she can until she finds herself outside the palace gates and begins to weave her way through the heaving city streets, moving at one with the sweaty, mourning crowd as it fights its way to the gates to witness the death of one of their beloved.
A combined effort of violent shoving and whispered insinuations find her at the front of the crowd some time later, and she looks down upon the man who is to seal her fate, the second Trojan prince to do so.
Hector is dead, and his carcass is mutilated. She is too far away to properly see, but her mind imagines a small droplet of blood falling from one of his wounds into the dust, making a small plip-plop every couple of seconds as it does so. Achilles stands near to the body, and she feels herself filling with venom at the arrogance in his stance. She cannot hate him though, for it is not he who has brought this about. It is her, and her alone.
The golden sun beats down heavily, and she feels the heat almost break her in this moment of realisation. She gazes around at the dirty faces surrounding her, each one contorted in sadness, and feels a small tear fall to her cheek. She welcomes the cool water as it leaves a track mark down the side of her face, and the cold sends a wave of possibility through her. The pain which had been threatening to envelop her is still for a moment, and like the cold moon following a path that is out of its hands once more, she throws off her veil and turns around to face the crowd. They gasp at the sight of her face, and part easily before her as she cuts her way through them. Within seconds she finds herself at the Trojan gates, and she hears a cold, clear voice command for them to be opened. With a shock she realises the voice is her own, and she walks out of the now open gates, slipping away across the sand to the Greek camp, feeling her soul disconnect a little bit more from her body with each step she takes.
Hector is dead, and now so is Nell.
But Helen is very much alive.