‘We should then attack Mycenae,’ Hector said. ‘Strike them first. The others in Greece, King Nestor, the Prince Achilles, many others, will curse us in public but they may support us in private. They fear the Mycenaean brothers as much as we do. Better to attack them on their ground than continue to dread them at home.’
Beside him the grey-bearded merchant Archos said loudly, ‘I would kill them now.’
‘While they’re under our roof?’ my father said, appalled.
‘Do you think if we visited them they wouldn’t do the same, or arrange an ambush as we left?’ Archos demanded.
There was a silence, as there so often is when the practical, but unthinkable, is said.
Anchises moved towards Archos. ‘Say no more, Archos. That is enough.’
Archos was unrepentant. He even glanced at me, as if to say to the others, Do you all, really, still believe Cassandra mad?
‘I dislike being threatened by these Greeks,’ mused Anchises.
‘All men and women are threatened by something,’ Hecuba said steadily. ‘Plague, bad harvests, famine, childbirth, an overlord’s whim –’ She looked sternly round the room catching each councillor’s eye. ‘We may have to load them until the ships are groaning. We may have to ask all to contribute flocks, produce, silver pieces. But we must get rid of them.’
And this was agreed.
Later, in private, Hector said bitterly to my father, ‘I still dream of falling on these Greeks suddenly and killing them all.’
‘And have all their Greek kin mount an expedition against us as soon as they can get a fleet together?’ Priam said. ‘You’d do better to speak to your brother. He’s our danger.’
‘I’ve tried. He avoids me. When I do manage to speak to him he can’t hear me. He’s a man in a dream.’
‘I asked him to leave the city. He refused. If only we had sent him to Hattusas with the trading party, not Deiphobus,’ said my father.
The two men gazed at each other.
I thought I would have drugged Paris’ wine and carried him off on a horse. Then my mother saw me and shivered. ‘Cassandra,’ she said, ‘you’ve heard nothing. Say nothing. These Greeks – they question children.’
I nodded. I went out and ran upstairs. I found Helen, sitting idly in a small room with the two Greek women who had accompanied her. A brazier burned in the middle of the floor which was decorated with bright rugs she must have brought with her, though the style was not Greek but Cretan. Through the archway I saw a great bed which she must also have brought and had erected in her own quarters. The room smelled sweetly of some herb her women must have flung on to the fire. Though she was Queen of Sparta, she had the seductive customs of an Egyptian or a Babylonian. She sat in a ray of sunshine from the window and I was awed by her. I fell on my knees and said in a low voice in my broken Greek, so the women could not hear, ‘Lady, I am Priam and Hecuba’s daughter. I plead with you to persuade your husband to take you home. Say you are sick, say you are expecting a child, say anything, but please go, or you will bring a horrible fate upon us.’
She smiled that meaningless smile, which filled her face with light, but no sense, and looked at me, saying, ‘What horrible fate do you expect, child?’
‘Death,’ I said. The women both heard the word, and went to their mistress. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘please – please go. Paris will not listen. You must’ The women were looking at me suspiciously. One had already pulled the big brooch from her shoulder, with its long pin like a narrow dagger. They expected treachery, even in the form of a child. And Helen put back her head and said with pride, ‘I love him.’
‘If your husband finds out –’ I said, and she looked even prouder, said something to the women and they hustled me out of the room. ‘You’ll kill us all,’ I screamed in the doorway, and the women shoved me forward so violently I fell on my knees.
How could I expect her to believe me? Her beauty had made her fate – she had been abducted when she was fourteen years old, then stolen from her captor by Menelaus who made her Queen of Sparta. At twenty, all she knew was being taken by violence, then seducing her captor. From my scraped knees I screamed, ‘Hecate’s dogs will get you, bitch.’
The sound of my child’s voice cursing in my own language brought one of the women, laughing, back to the doorway. But now I was on my feet and her smile faded. ‘Tell her she’ll make the world scream, and she’ll be screaming loudest,’ I proclaimed. Helen and her women stared from the doorway. Blood may have been dripping from my knee, but my gaze was fierce, arms wide above my head, fists clenched – in the old gesture of power, I held the priestess’s ancient stance. Helen was frightened. ‘What is your name?’ she asked.
‘Cassandra,’ I said, ‘and I always tell the truth.’ I did not add the rest, that I was never believed.
She gave me a blind stare. Her woman, horrified, pulled herself together and led her back into the room. Satisfied that I had frightened them, I left. But how long would Helen’s fear last, I wondered?
Menelaus passed me, not noticing a skinny child. He lurched towards his wife’s room, with burning eyes. Paris, Menelaus and Helen were now all strange to me, as if they had dropped from the moon to the plains of Troy. Being a child accustomed to mad people beating their breasts in the street, or rushing about foaming at the mouth, with a crowd after them trying to catch them, I now assumed they were in the same state and not much more predictable. In any case, ‘All Greeks are mad,’ was now the watchword of the palace, for underneath the manners of the two kings and their henchmen we observed their slyness, their mistrust – they believed they were continually being lied to; they had the air of fierce dogs kept barely under control by some invisible master. They behaved as if they were among enemies. They slept with guards across their doors. They sometimes unaccountably refused food at the banquet until they saw Trojans eat it, so that we came to believe they thought we might poison them. This was why we considered them mad. But Hector, who thought more like a Greek himself, told my parents, ‘They only suspect us of doing to them what they would gladly do to us.’ Even so, the madness of Helen, Menelaus and my brother was of a different order. They had been cursed with passion, I thought. None of the three could help themselves.
I retreated to where the servants were lighting fires and sweeping up for yet another banquet in the great hall. At dusk the Trojan nobles, and the Greeks back from their foraying in the countryside, or conferences in the palace, or from tending their ships, sat down. At the head of the table were my parents, the two Greek kings and Helen; others sat on stools or benches near the fire. I found a place near the end of the table with my little sister Polyxena. Half an ox, huge platters of bread and salads, huge bowls of spiced lentils were brought in. Silver, gold and pottery jugs of wine were at first carried round, then placed on the table for the guests to help themselvs. They mixed it with water from large pottery jugs. The two flute players played airs and dances as we ate. In spite of the hospitable atmosphere, hosts and guests did not appear happy and the men became drunk quickly. I went to as few of these meals as possible, but if I didn’t, I was reduced to hanging about the kitchen taking what food they would give me, which, as they were so busy, was not much. I was driven to these uneasy feasts by hunger.
That evening Menelaus was barely watering his wine. As the torches on the walls were lit I saw his brother warn him about it. Helen, lovely and straight-backed in her chair, seemed to be elsewhere. While the flutes wailed, the party at the top of the table was largely silent and the meat and bread turned to lead in the stomachs of all. Paris, happily, was not there. He had at least the discretion not to join in the convivialities of the table with the man he was cuckolding, or stare at his lover in the torchlight, imagining no one could interpret his look. I suspected Hector had warned him to stay away and ordered him on to picket duty – at the edge of the two farms behind the city belonging to the palace, a small force usually guarded against raiders or thieves. He was either there or on harbour du
ty or patrolling the coastal areas against pirates, a fairly nominal duty at present, since the prime coastal pirates were at our table eating heartily.
Meanwhile, an air of sourness and mistrust pervaded the atmosphere, in spite of my mother’s desperate attempts to stint nothing, show the guests nothing but courtesy, pay flautists, harpists and singers generously to give of their best The blind old man, Calchas, moved his head about, following the sounds of the room. All too often his face, when I raised my eyes, was turned in my direction. He knew me for what I was. Perhaps he also knew Menelaus was being betrayed by my brother, I thought, but he would say nothing, fearing Menelaus’ sword. My father’s manner was strained. He was now resigned to my mother’s opening of the treasury to our guests, who were becoming discontented. The ostensible reason for their visit was to negotiate that they should pay no harbour fees. My father had refused. The harbour fees constituted half the money the city could expect annually in cash and the Greek offer of a reciprocal arrangement at their own port was hardly more than a trick. The gain to us would be nominal and they knew it. My parents had offered to halve the normal fee, and that offer had not so far been refused or accepted. (Hecuba was right: the only way now was to pay them to go.) Meanwhile they stayed on, lowering suspiciously, especially Menelaus, with his notion that something, he didn’t know what, was wrong. We Trojans affected ease and dignity, while feeling afraid, like hens when they sense a fox is on the prowl.
Polyxena, my sister, her head in her hand, said, ‘I think they find our piper tedious. I think they do. Do you remember the visit of King Tudhaliyas?’
This great king of the Hittites, now dead, had arrived last spring from his city in the mountains to confirm our allegiance to him, with a glittering train made up of his servants, two of his wives, and four of his concubines, the women all dressed in vivid scarlets and blues with headdresses jingling with gold. He brought gifts of gold and spices, and five musicians. There were two harpists, two flautists and a drummer, all eunuchs of the great priestesses of his kingdom. To add to the excitement, his guards were a contingent of twenty tall women soldiers. The palace had filled with scents, and the sound of women’s laughter and jingling ornaments.
At the evening meal each night during the Hittite king’s visit, the air had been full of music. As his retinue had been small, his women soldiers – there were two hundred at his own palace – sat among us. These troops were much dreaded by other armies for their ferocity. They came from high mountain villages and, when they became too old and began to tire of fighting, they returned to the mountains where, using their pay as dowries, they bought land and married the men they chose (except for the ones who loved each other, who went back and lived together as they had while serving as soldiers). On campaign the Amazons bivouacked together, away from the men, who were forbidden to go past their pickets.
The Hittite king was a dark brown man with a clear black stare, a crimped black beard and crimped hair to his shoulders. His right arm and both his legs were heavily scarred. He had a ready, hearty laugh. I told Adosha I would marry him when I was older. Adosha said if I wanted to be his ninety-ninth wife, and live in a palace, however magnificent, with ninety-eight other wives and countless concubines and children, then she felt sorry for me; she would rather be the only wife of a poor farmer – at least she’d see her husband more than twice a year. She told my mother of my childish ambition.
‘Why do you want to marry the Great King?’ she asked. She would not have been blind to the political advantages of a marriage between him and her daughter.
‘He laughs,’ I said. ‘And as for all the other wives – I could make sure he loved me best.’
My mother, who I now believe had decided I would be better off as a priestess of Hecate, looked at me doubtfully.
‘I could tell him who to fight and who to trust,’ I said persuasively. ‘What better dowry could anyone bring, better than a thousand silver cups and a thousand herds of cattle, sheep and goats?’
They did not know what was to befall us or they would have made the match for me then and there and exported me to the Hittite court, where I might have become in time an influential queen, mother of an emperor, though not by Tudhaliyas, for he was dead.
But the gaiety of the Hittite visit was gone. Now we sat, some forty of us, my father’s friends, nobles, older children, landowners and their wives, at meat with our gloomy hostile guests. As the meal continued the atmosphere grew, uncheckably, worse. The guests got drunker. Half-arguments arose. Many sat silent. Unfortunately, the flautist gave way to two singers, young sisters from the mountains, who sang of love, and Menelaus sat plunged in gloom next to his brother, while Helen sat opposite, erect in her chair like a dancer, a half-smile on her face, waiting. For what? For Paris? I think he was only a shadow of what she really wanted and needed. They called her the child of god and a human woman, and her sister, too. They might have been. Neither could endure plain human life. Both wanted more, tried for it, and ruined lives. In the semi-darkness the faces of the Greeks seemed more deeply lined, their aspect more violent. The two sisters sang a lament, wailing filled the air, increasing the gloom. Calchas’ lined face moved about blindly. You could almost see the thoughts, impressions and calculations moving in that tortoise head.
The big wooden doors were flung open. Five servants entered, bearing gifts obviously marked down earlier for the Greeks. There were two golden bowls, bronze buckles, gold pins, a necklace and earrings made of gold and lapis lazuli, a vast ivory drinking cup, carved with elephants. All this treasure was set, item by item, in front of the Greek chieftains. The guests exclaimed, the Greeks got up and crowded behind the chairs of their leaders to examine the spoil, much of which glinted a little in the light. It would be redistributed by their leaders to the loyal and faithful later. My father bent forward, obviously making a dignified speech, saying the gifts were unworthy of the Greeks, but he hoped they would none the less accept them. I could hear little of his words from my end of the table. In turn came Agamemnon’s bass voice thanking the king for his generosity. He tried not to stare too calculatingly at the costly gifts. During the excitement I slipped out, went to my cold room and sat waiting for Helenus, for I had felt he would come to me. He arrived not long after and shivered as he sat down on the rug in front of the empty brazier. He heaped another sheepskin round our shoulders and said, ‘I don’t care what happens. I’m so miserable. You can’t imagine how smelly and noisy it is living among the men. They’re drunk every night now the Greeks are here. If you step out at night to relieve yourself you come across some oaf fucking a servant against a wall. All I want to do is marry a nice woman with a farm and live there in peace. I’d rather marry you, but you haven’t got a farm.’
‘You can’t marry your sister.’
He went on, ‘There’s one friendly boy from Lycia, but I’ve frightened him with my nightmares. I think he’s going to die, anyway. I’ve seen it. I’m so tired – tired of seeing the future, tired of waiting for a catastrophe no one else is expecting, I’m like a dog or a cat shivering before an earthquake. Let’s go and sleep with Okarno tonight. No one will notice. The atmosphere’s getting worse. Those gifts will make everything more complicated. They’ll only want more.’
‘I think they’ll go soon,’ I said. ‘They’ve fattened themselves and their horses enough – they have their growing crops to tend now. Time to return before their slaves grow lazy, wives out of order, neighbours greedy. And they know now what they came to find out – the lie of the land, how many farms, the size and nature of the people.’
There was a fight that night between the soldiers and the palace guards. We heard it from the stable, where we were burrowed under the hay. Next day, they said, twenty or thirty Greeks and Trojans had clashed swords on the walled road beside the palace, overlooking the sea. There were drunken shouts, clattering of swords and shields, and a scream; then Hector, it sounded like, and one of the Greek captains, were bellowing in their own tongues at their
men. Then came sounds of sulky withdrawal as order was restored.
In the morning, when I entered the hall, many men were asleep on their arms over the table, as the serving women crept about, clearing up. Plates and goblets lay on the floor, the dogs had dragged the remains of the meat from the table, even now a bitch and her four puppies were at work on a cow’s thigh bone in a corner. There was a smell of vomit and piss. It had been a night of disgrace for all.
My mother arrived in a white robe, her hair loose, her face grey with fatigue. She thrust brooms into our hands and said, ‘Sweep out every corner.’ My sister, dark Clemone, daughter of my father by an Egyptian woman, looked sideways at me, but we took our brooms, and swept
When we had finished, and rinsed our foul brooms in a bucket, we went to the ramparts and stood by the tower, watching the sun rise over the sea to the left and the greening land below us on the right The clashing of pots and the scraping of tables being moved inside the hall went on. Weary men passed us, going to the hall. There was now the faint smell of bread baking from the kitchens. Clemone said, ‘They took my brother for the men’s hall last night.’
‘He’s seven years old,’ I said.
‘And several others, no bigger. What do you think it means?’
‘You know what it means,’ I told her.
The Greeks breakfasted in the cleaned hall, on fresh food. Hosts and guests were silent. Heads ached, no doubt, and the clash of soldiers the night before had been embarrassing for all. Clemone and I returned to wait on the guests as well-brought-up young women are trained to. I approached the massive form of Agamemnon with my eyes downcast, offering him a cup of well-watered wine. His great hand took the goblet, not round the stem, but round the bowl. His hand, large, well-shaped and well-manicured, touched mine. Darkness swept over me. Then I saw what I should not have seen, never wished to see – and I fainted. Clemone said my mother leaped forward from nowhere, like a cat leaping from a corner, and bent over me, took me in her own arms and carried me at a run from the hall. Meanwhile, said Clemone, King Agamemnon re-seated himself and drank, smiling, from the cup I’d given him. The spectacle of my proud, clever mother running and crying out amused him, it seems.
Cassandra Page 6
