Andromache
She awoke on the floor of the ship and heard the waves of water hit from all sides. There were roughly fifty men on the ship, and many of them were discussing the events that unfolded during the fall of Troy.
"Only the weakest of men would take back an unfaithful wife who has humiliated him to all of Hellas. Had I been King Menelaus, I would have plunged a sword straight through that Spartan whore's heart."
"It was the will of the gods that she should live."
"No doubt. But it's a shame, isn't it? That we watched Neoptolemus plunge his sword into that innocent child while the whore of Sparta gets to live? And this one…"
She didn't look, but knew he was gesturing to her.
"…no doubt Hector's wife will kill herself the first chance she gets. No woman would want to be the slave of her child's killer."
"That's why Neoptolemus said we have to keep her bound tightly. Until we reach Tenedos."
She opened her eyes. Her wrists and ankles were bound tightly by rope, and those ropes were tied to the mast of the ship. It was to keep her from jumping overboard.
The sun baked her skin.
She wasn't the only one tied to the mast of the ship. Helenus, too, was bound—he was Hector's sole surviving brother, a seer captured on Mount Ida as they neared the tenth year of the war. His prophecies had helped the Achaeans take the city.
"Andromache," Helenus said. He noticed she had woken.
She refused to speak to him. She hadn't spoken to anyone at all since they threw her baby from the walls of the city. That was two days ago.
"It's not over," Helenus said. "I've seen the future, and it is not over."
She was sixteen when she married Hector. Hector was thirty-two. The age difference was nothing out of the ordinary.
She remembered the warm welcome she had received from the royal Trojan family when she first arrived at the city. Ten of Hector's younger brothers and sisters greeted the newlyweds at the Scaean Gates. Paris was not there—he had sailed for Hellas, to bargain with the Achaeans for the return of his aunt Hesione.
A little girl with brown ringlets tumbled into Hector's arms—it was his youngest sister, Polyxena, then only five years old.
"Our Hector's finally married," the princess Laodice said with a laugh, stretching her arms out and welcoming Andromache with a sisterly embrace.
Hector's younger brothers and sisters introduced themselves to Andromache: the crafty Deiphobus, then twenty-two, the twin prophets Cassandra and Helenus who were both sixteen (it would be two more months before Cassandra went mad), the lovely princess Creusa who had not yet wed Aeneas, and many boys who would come of age during the war and die before the city fell.
When the ship reached the island of Tenedos, someone untied the ropes that bound Andromache to the mast and helped her up to a standing position. Another gave her clean drinking water.
Two men boarded the ship—one very young with red-gold curls, one very old with almost no hair at all. The young one was Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. He was the one who received Andromache as a prize of war.
The very sight of Neoptolemus caused a wave of revulsion to run through her. She closed her eyes for a brief moment so she wouldn't have to look at him. Thankfully, Neoptolemus ignored her and turned to Helenus.
"Have your visions told you where we are headed, Seer?" Neoptolemus asked.
"Epirus," answered Helenus. "The same direction as King Odysseus."
Andromache lowered her head so that she could avoid notice.
"Yes," confirmed Neoptolemus, "but my grandmother tells me that Poseidon is eager to stir the seas against those sailing west. We will sail north instead to Thrace, and from Thrace we will journey on foot."
Even though Andromache kept her head lowered, she could tell Neoptolemus had turned his attention to her.
He walked up to her and she shrank back instinctively. Though he stood right in front of her, she kept her eyes focused intently on the mast of the ship. He reached his hand out and touched his thumb to her cheek, moving it along her cheekbone. The touch made her feel sick inside. Helenus stayed silent.
Neoptolemus drew his hand away. "We will stay on Tenedos for two more days so the storms may pass. We will need tents, and a fire."
Helenus bowed his head. "Yes Master." The additional months in captivity had accustomed him to his position as a slave.
Unlike most of the Achaean leaders, Neoptolemus had few slave girls of his own. The female slaves of his father—spoils of war from the cities of Thebe, Antandrus, and Lyrnessus—had been distributed among the other Achaean leaders when Achilles died.
Apart from Andromache, the only female travelers were three palace servants who had been taken captive as well. The three servants were good friends with one another and loved to sing. Their names were Strophe, Antistrophe, and Epode.
After a man led Andromache into a large tent, the three songbirds stripped off her robes and helped her bathe. They washed the dirt and tearstains from her face and rubbed scented oils onto her skin to heal the damage done by the salty spray of the sea.
"Our poor mistress," said Strophe sadly. "Once set to be the next queen of Troy, now slave to the son of her husband's slayer."
"She is not the first royal to become a slave," said Antistrophe. "I hear old Aethra was mother to the famous Theseus."
"Perhaps with time she will come to love her captor," said Strophe. "Briseis of Lyrnessus did."
"Briseis of Lyrnessus did not lose a child," said Antistrophe.
Fresh tears rolled down Andromache's cheeks.
"I want to die," she whispered. "Yet I am too much of a coward to do it myself."
Epode smiled sadly at her and wiped away her mistress's tears with a napkin. "It's because you still hold onto hope."
Andromache wished she didn't.
Once they had bathed her and dressed her in long golden robes that trailed to the floor, taken from her own store-room, they decked her in jewels and wrapped a jeweled band around her hair. And then they departed, leaving her alone as a small fire crackled in the bronze brazier at the tent's center, illuminating the tent in a reddish-orange glow. A pile of goatskin hides formed a bed in the corner.
She looked around the tent. A table in the corner supported two gold chalices and a tall bronze amphora filled with wine. A dull ache resonated within her when she recognized the chalices. They were the spoils of Cilician Thebe, taken in the eighth year of the war when Achilles sacked the city and killed her father and brothers.
She looked down at her robes and fingered the dark gold embroidery. She had stitched it herself—whirling flower patterns ran along the hem.
And there she waited in dread, knowing who the next person to come into the tent would be. She was glad Hector couldn't see her now.
Footsteps sounded outside the tent, and soon Neoptolemus appeared from behind a flap. His face contained a look of apathy. He was well-dressed, having returned from a sacrifice to Pallas Athena.
His presence caused her to look down.
"Pour me a cup of wine," he ordered.
It was her first task as a slave. She lifted the bronze amphora on the table and slowly tilted the dark liquid into a gold chalice. Neoptolemus watched her apathetically.
"How old are you?" he asked her calmly.
She kept her eyes down. "Twenty-seven," she murmured quietly.
"So you're the same age as Helenus. I'm seventeen."
Andromache rested the amphora back on the table.
Neoptolemus drank deeply from the chalice. When he set it back on the table, His eyes lingered for a moment on her robes. "I've always admired the long embroidered robes worn by Anatolian women. There is a modesty to it that you don't find in women from Hellas."
She knew he expected her to say something, so she quietly said, "I embroidered it myself."
He tilted his head slightly, mildly intrigued. "Did you really? If that's the case, you must take care not to let it crinkle. Perhaps it is best to take it off."
The words took a moment to set in. Andromache continued to stand their numbly, keeping her face impassive.
"Did you hear me?" Neoptolemus asked softly. "I said take it off."
She undid the pins at her shoulders slowly, keeping her eyes on a knot on the wooden table so she would not have to look up. She felt the fabric of her robes fall away, baring her naked body. She willed her mind away from it.
She heard his breath sharpen as he looked at her.
"Stand over there," he said, "so I may have a better look at you."
She had not seen where he had pointed. "Where?"
"Over there." He gestured to the brazier at the center of the tent.
The robes had fallen around her feet. She stepped out of them, fighting the urge to hide her body with her hands because the gesture would have made her look as humiliated as she felt. She stood by the brazier, completely exposed in front of the young man who had thrown her small boy off the walls of Troy, whose father had killed her own father, and her brothers, and her husband.
Neoptolemus studied her under the light of the brazier. "So this is what Hector sees."
It was too much. Tears fell down her cheeks again. Neoptolemus didn't seem to care. He slouched in his seat and put one hand under his tunic, stroking himself slowly.
"Do you know why I requested you as my prize?" he asked softly, his eyes moving from her breasts to the dark mass between her legs.
She decided not to answer at all, and kept her eyes on the wooden table so she would not have to look at him.
He continued, "In the Achaean fortifications, the warriors would often speak of the beautiful girls on the opposite side of the wall. They would talk endlessly about Laodice's fair skin, Cassandra's big dark eyes, and Polyxena with her glossy curls. Though the men never spoke about you the same way they spoke about your kunyadhas, you were revered all the same. Everyone saw you as the ideal wife—faithful, sweet-tempered, a far cry from the treacherous Helen. It was a shame that the ideal woman belonged to Troy—the city that robbed me of a father. That is why I decided you would belong to me."
He rose from his seat, still stroking himself under the hem of his tunic.
"Go to the bed" he ordered, "on your hands and knees."
She numbly obeyed. He came over to her and climbed behind her, putting one hot sweaty hand on each of her hips. She could hear his ragged breath over one of her shoulders.
Hector would have killed him.
Neoptolemus was clumsy-he knew little as to what he was doing and thrusted from the wrong angle. The movement stabbed at the sensitive folds of her skin and she braced herself from crying out in pain. He gripped her hips harder, uttering words of pleasure under his breath as he found his way inside of her and then began thrusting very quickly, skin slapping against skin. The goatskin hides shifted under the repetitive motions. Behind her, Neoptolemus had worked up a sweat. She could feel it smear itself against the skin on her back, and behind her thighs.
It was the most humiliating experience of her life.
At last he released her, exhaling loudly and falling onto his back. He touched her cheek in almost a caress and she recoiled at it.
"May I go now," she said quietly.
He gave a lazy wave of his hand.
"Go," he grunted as he lay on his back to catch his breath.
She stood up, and she felt a thick glob of his seed ooze out of her. She wiped it away with her hand, and then wiped her hand on a napkin. She dressed and felt the sweat he had left on her body contaminate her gold robes. The sharp smell of his body lingered on her.
She stumbled out of the tent, past Neoptolemus's guards, and fell to her knees, retching into the dirt. And then she put her hands to her face and began crying so hard she felt her whole body shake. The guards of Neoptolemus stood silent in the darkness like statues, unmoved by the tears of the young woman who once thought to be the next queen of Troy.
Only the trees seemed to join Andromache in her mourning. Their branches bent softly in the wind, spirits of the hamadryads rustling their whispers of sorrow.
A/N: Story of Andromache's life after the war comes from three sources: Euripides' play Andromache, Apollodorus' Epitome, and a short scene in the Aeneid.