Silence
Truthfully, I never really blamed her for it. As you said, because she was the daughter of one king and the wife of another, and because the incident involved a foreign dignitary, her morality was a public affair. I am a priestess; I feel the same subtle pressure to be what I ought. It isn't an easy thing to live up to. Perhaps I feel it more acutely because I am a foreigner here. I have, too, the dissonance between my own religious conscience and the religious life of the people among whom I live.
--Oh, we practice human sacrifice, too, in Hellas. No, no, I'm not going to lie to you about that. Why should I, when I was so nearly the sacrifice myself? The difference is that it is very routine for the Taurians, whereas in Hellas, it is not—or is no longer—a part of our normal religious life. I suspect that it is, or was, customary at the beginning of a war, a time which is not normal by any stretch of the imagination. I don't enjoy my duties, but I feel obliged, both to Tauris and to the goddess. At least I can understand what the victims must feel: I can share that with them.
--Yes, I'm sure my mother was horrified when she found out; she was at heart a civilized woman. I can't imagine that my father was devoid of feeling, either, but there was too much at stake. He had to go through with it.
--But I was never told, you see. I really believed, in my naïveté, that my father wanted me at Aulis so that he could marry me to Achilles, and so that he could see me before he left. I was flattered, and a little bit frightened; I can't have been very old, only fifteen or sixteen. I'm certain that my mother knew—or learned, once we arrived—but we were only women, and we were away from home. If we had been in the Argolid, where my mother had powerful family, things might have been very different.
--No. I didn't blame my aunt. Not for Aulis. I knew very well that she had gone, and I had some idea of why—of course it wasn't the whole truth, for I'd heard it from a slave. I do not remember any strong feelings towards her in my childhood; she was simply Aunt Helen, a bit like the ebony table in my mother's quarters, something that had always been there and that would continue to be there forever.
We did not go often to Sparta in those last few years, so I don't know what the atmosphere there was like. Helen was simply never discussed in our home after that; to hear my father talk, you wouldn't think that she had anything to do with the war at all. I'm sure it weighed on my mother; Helen's behavior cast a shadow on her.
There was, it seems to me now, a desperate impulse to pretend that anything painful was somehow not real, as though my father and uncle weren't headed for a world of pain that would be proven real enough. Troy might as well have been on the moon; it was almost as if my mother had never had a sister called Helen. The silence at Aulis was an extension of the silence at Mycenae; if someone had only said something! I don't know if it would have been better, in the end, but it might have been more bearable in the short term.
In my own way, I am as culpable as my parents.
Someday, I will no longer be able to remain silent here.