The Memoirs of Helen of Troy: A Novel - Amanda Elyot - Hardcover

Chapter 1 I learned that I was different when I was a very small girl: when the golden curls, which barely reached my shoulders at the time, began to turn the color of burnished vermeil. Your grandmother Leda, whom you never knew, told me that I was a child of Zeus. Since I thought my father's name was Tyndareus, her words upset me. Seeing my pink cheeks marred by tears of confusion, my mother handed me a mirror of polished bronze and asked me to study my reflection. "Do you look like me?" she asked. I nodded, noting in my own skin the exquisite fairness of her complexion, and her hair the same shade as mine that tumbled like flowing honey past the hollow of her back. "And do you resemble my husband Tyndareus?" she said to me. I looked in the mirror and then looked again. For several minutes I remember expecting the mirror to show me my father's face, but Tyndareus was olive complected where I was not, his nose like the beak of a falcon where my own was straight and fine-boned, and his cheekbones were hollow and slack where, even then, beneath a child's rosy plumpness, mine were high and prominent. "It's time for me to tell you everything," my mother said, and without another word, she clasped my hand and led me along the corridor of the gynaeceum, the women's quarters of the palace that overlooked a pretty courtyard inlaid with colored tile. I remember running my little finger along the polychrome frescoes that were painted on the courtyard walls, tracing the crests of the cerulean waves that depicted tales of Spartan sea voyages to Cyprus, Ithaca, and Crete, places whose names I'd heard, but which were no more than exotic sounds to me at the time. Even rendered in artists' colors, the Great Sea held an allure that I could not then explain. As a child, my favorite part of the painted waves was the spray that tipped each one; I was certain it was real enough to evaporate like soap bubbles on my fingertip. My mother told me that Aphrodite, our goddess of love and beauty, was born of the seafoam. She was the most beautiful goddess in the world, Leda said, and one of the oldestas old as Zeus, although men had forgotten that, preferring to honor the newer, warrior goddesses sexless Athena and Artemis the chaste. I had seen only five summers then, but on that day, my mother told me that I was old enough to learn the story of Aphrodite's extraordinary conception. "Long ago," my mother began, "there was a tremendous battle in the heavens. Zeus's father, Kronos, who was the son of earth and sky, quarreled with his own father, Uranus; with a sharpened flint, Kronos destroyed his father's fertile manhood, severing it from Uranus's body and flinging it into the sea below. As it plunged into the hungry waves, the winedark water boiled up into a white frothseafoamfrom which emerged the goddess Cypris, who we call Aphrodite; she was accompanied by ErosLust,and HimerosDesire." "I don't understand," I said to her, focusing I suppose on the grotesque act of dismemberment and wondering how someone so beautiful could end up being born through such a disgusting exploit. "Love and Beauty, Lust and Desire are almost as old as the world," my mother answered. They were part of an old religion, she said, long before Zeus became king of the gods. "Come, I'll show you." Her decision seemed a sudden one. My mother had always considered me too young to initiate into the mysteries of the old ways, when men and women alike saw wisdom in plants, divinity in trees and streams. That was beforeElyot, Amanda is the author of 'The Memoirs of Helen of Troy: A Novel - Amanda Elyot - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780307209986 and ISBN 0307209989.