Read Online Helen of Troy by Margaret George - Free Book Online

into buying. But instead of the usual banter and urging, she let loose with a shriek. Her eyes, until then seeing nothing but a possible sale, widened in disbelief.
    “It’s her! It’s her!” she cried. She jumped up and grabbed my arms, pulling me toward her, knocking over the basket of bracelets and spilling their glitter all around.
    Clytemnestra, muttering, pulled me back, and they began tugging at me as if I were a sack of grain.
    “Help me! Help me!” the merchant called to her fellows. “Hold her! It’s Helen !”
    They rose up as one and rushed over to us. Clytemnestra was stronger than the bracelet-woman and had wrenched me away from her grasp, hiding me in the folds of her cloak, but we were completely surrounded. Only armed bodyguards could have held them back.
    Clytemnestra held me fiercely to her side, so tightly that I could see nothing, but I could feel the trembling of her body. “Stand back!” she ordered, her voice gruff. “Stand back, or you will answer to the king for this! Let us depart in peace.”
    “Let us see her face!” a voice from the crowd demanded. “Let us see her face, and then you may depart!”
    “No,” Clytemnestra said. “It is not your right to look upon the princess.”
    “We see your face,” another, deeper voice said, “and you are also our princess. I say, let us see Helen! Unless she is a monster, has the beak of a swan, the beak of her father—”
    “Her father and mine are the same—your king, Tyndareus. Let such slander stop,” Clytemnestra said, her voice ringing.
    “Then show us!” a man’s voice demanded. “Why has she been hidden away all these years up in the palace, never showing herself to us as you have been shown, as Castor and Polydeuces have been shown, openly, coming to the city, playing in the open fields, unless it’s true—she’s the daughter of Zeus, who came to the queen as a swan, and was hatched from an egg—”
    “An egg of hyacinthine blue,” another voice cried. “I’ve seen the eggshell—preserved—”
    “What nonsense!” Clytemnestra bellowed. “You’ve been too long at the shrine of Hyacinthus nearby, he’s put these fantasies in your heads—”
    “No, the egg is real, its shell really was blue—”
    “Someone saw the swan and the queen down by the riverbank. And the swan sometimes still comes back, as if he’s lovesick. He’s bigger than the others—stronger—whiter—”
    “Let us pass!” Clytemnestra commanded. “Or I’ll curse you!”
    A moment of quiet followed as they considered her words. I still could not see anything, enveloped as I was in the folds of her cloak.
    A voice broke the silence. “She’s a monster! That’s why you hide her!”
    “A monster! A monster like the Gorgon. A hideous apparition!”
    “Let us go!” Clytemnestra repeated. “Or perhaps . . . if she is a monster, I will let you see her, and that will be the curse. Remember the power of the Gorgon to turn onlookers to stone.”
    A quiet murmur followed the threat. I should have felt safer, but Clytemnestra’s hint, even if was clever, hurt me. She was willing to paint me a monster, dreadful to look upon, and leave the people of Sparta believing that, rather than give in to them.
    I twisted out from under Clytemnestra’s grip and flung off my cowl, baring my head before the crowd.
    The crowd was a large one—a circle of people several rows deep. I had never seen so many faces.
    “I am Helen!” I cried. “Look your fill!” I held my head high and braced myself.
    There was silence. Utter, deep silence. The faces turned toward me, like moonflowers following the moon as she makes her nightly journey across the sky. The expressions drained away, replaced by a calm as serene as if they were under that moonlight.
    Finally someone murmured, “It is true. Only the daughter of Zeus could have such a face.”
    “So terrible . . . it blinds . . .” they murmured. But what they were truly seeing in my face was also the power