Blame
Truthfully, I didn't know her. Well, not very well. I spoke a little Greek with her, just to keep in practice after the war was over. Neoptolemus wasn't interested in having me, and I can't say I was interested in having him, even had the choice been mine; he had all of his father's talent, and none of his father's personality.
She was always nice enough to me, although she was a little scandalized by my accent at first. The Greek I'd heard had been barracks talk, and Achilles was from a rural area. Apparently he spoke a very debased dialect, which I hadn't known; when she addressed me for the first time, I said, "Ayuh?" without thinking. I was informed that the word was yes, not ayuh—not unkindly, but firmly, as though I were a naughty child.
Not so long ago, she'd lived in the Troad; now that she was home, she was the queen, and I the conquered peon. (I learnt very quickly that it made no difference to most Greeks that I was not a Trojan.) If I had been an uninformed onlooker and watched her in her sitting room or her quarters, I might well have thought that she had never been away. Whether the war left any mark on her at all, I didn't know. I couldn't imagine that it wouldn't—even those of us who lived through it, on both sides, were changed forever by it.
Even in front of the girls who had been her maids in Troy, she never reminisced about Troy, and in time, I marked a coldness between them and her. She never discussed it, even when Menelaus wasn't around to hear. I never heard her say anything so simple as, Do you remember…? It was almost as though, for her, it had been a dream or a distraction—as though, in short, it simply had not happened. Once, fumbling along, I asked her if she had ever seen the gardens at the palace; she blinked and looked confused, as though I had taken her for someone else, and then said, "Oh, yes," rather dismissively. Priam's gardens were famous as far afield as Scythia.
In the first years after the war, after we had all come to Hellas, we talked constantly, as though to try and find a place for this new experience. As the years passed and we became resigned to our fates, we talked less—but still, the very act of conversation reassured us that it had not all been a dream. She never seemed to need to talk, or want to talk; perhaps, while we were trying to hang on to our previous lives, to remember that they had been real, she was trying to expunge hers thoroughly.
At least, I thought this was the case until I ran into her, quite alone, one day. She had been crying; I remember feeling a pang of envy. Helen did not get blotchy or red-nosed as the rest of us did. She was startled—evidently she had thought she was quite alone. I made a clumsy apology and offered to leave; she said that I could stay, that she wanted to tell me something.
It was with great difficulty that she stammered, "Dear God, Briseis, I do so wish that you'd all stop talking about Troy all the time! Do you think it's easy for me? Do you think I like being reminded of Paris? I know the girls hate me for everything that happened there, and I suppose I deserve it, but it's hard enough to hate myself for the whole thing without their adding to it!"
I stood there, stunned—I think I squeaked out something ridiculous to the effect that we were very sorry. After all, what could I have said to her?
I wasn't about to tell her that Laodike and Adeia thought she'd gotten too hoity-toity to be friendly with them anymore, that Eurydike had never forgiven her for the loss of her fiancé, that Astyoche thought she had no feelings for anyone else—in short, that her self-recrimination was no more than the truth.