Cassandra

by Hilary Bailey

  One of my sisters, sent to fetch wine for the captain, told me my father had sat still in his chair while my mother, arms raised, stood and uttered a cry of despair. ‘Menelaus will discover that he and Helen are lovers,’ she declared. ‘He will kill him, if he hasn’t already.’ They decided to send a messenger to Sparta to recall Paris, threatening that if he did not return immediately he would not be allowed back in the city at all. But a week had already gone by. The damage might be done; the message come too late.

  The messenger had already sailed when next day, late at night, a ship came into the harbour. It carried Paris, the Trojan ambassadors and Menelaus’ wife, Helen, with what looked like the entire contents of Menelaus’ treasure-house.

  The other contingent, those who had been sent to Agamemnon’s court, arrived only two days later, very angry. They had barely escaped with their lives once the sweat-stained messenger from Menelaus had got to Mycenae to tell what had happened. Had it not been for Advenor, the horse-master, whom they’d taken with them in case some horse-trading might be involved in the negotiations, they might, they said, have been dead. He had fortunately been eating his supper out in the courtyard with the stablemen from Agamemnon’s court, when he spotted the messenger coming through the gates in a lather. He’d seen something on the messenger’s face he didn’t like and managed to approach him, bribe him and find out in advance what he was going to report – that Paris of Troy had seduced away Menelaus’ wife and taken half the treasury with her. He warned the Trojan party just in time for them to make a hasty getaway with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. All dignity forgotten, they’d galloped off on any beasts they could find and been forced to fight their way to their ship in a hail of arrows and spears. One man, swimming to the ship, was hit by a spear, and they’d had to leave him behind.

  Yet, for everyone else in Troy, Paris’ feat seemed like a triumph. We had been continually harassed by the Greeks for years. They had stayed on too long in hostility at the palace. We had sent them off with rich gifts. They had responded by mounting a shock attack against the city at night, in which Trojans had died. We, having chased them off, had then sent a peace mission. So far, all the courtesy had been on our side, all the aggression on theirs. Our position was beginning to look to citizens and nobles alike more like humiliation than restraint. Now here came Paris, who had cuckolded the Greek king and brought away his beautiful wife and many objects of beauty and value as well. The moment the word was out, and it did not take long, a procession of excited people hurried down to the quay to cheer and get the details from the sailors.

  Next day Paris was greeted in the streets with cheers, applause and laughter. Women held up their boys for him to kiss, hoping for some transfer of his powers over women, no doubt. Tales circulated about the wealth with which he had returned. In short, everyone felt cheered at having struck a counter-blow at the Greeks. Even my father, though he should have known better, and in fact did, could not help being pleased. He showed many marks of love and favour to Paris and gave him a house near the palace and costly linens and woven rugs and blankets. These things Paris hardly needed, since he had returned with Menelaus’ wealth. Priam had bought the house from the parents of one of the warriors killed in the battle with the retreating Greeks less than a month before – they had decided to retire to their farm now their marriageable boy was dead. My mother said this was an unfortunate move, and could bring bad luck.

  Paris, in the meanwhile, swept through the streets in his chariot, smiling his radiant and charming smile, rich on Menelaus’ gold and happy in the love of a beautiful bride, the man who had made the Greek kings a laughing stock.

  My brother Hector was less enthusiastic about him. I think he was indignant that my father had rewarded Paris for an act of passion, and probably folly. He also feared the consequences. I was sitting quietly at my loom, making a poor job of a piece of weaving under my mother’s eye as she spoke with Anchises about some official correspondence, when Hector came in, raging. He paced round the room. ‘In Greece the other rulers are all laughing at the brothers. Menelaus and Agamemnon will come after us like a swarm of wasps now. Who will have to deal with them? I shall.’

  My mother, looking up from her letter, said only, ‘Paris, my son, alas is a fool.’ And, ‘One fool married to another,’ Anchises said. My mother did not reprove him for the insult to her son and unlooked-for daughter-in-law.

  Paris and Helen created something like a second kingdom within Troy – a kingdom of love and pleasure. Inside the magnificent house given them by my father there was no sense of any ill fate. The money seized from Menelaus’ treasury – Helen claimed it was her dowry, which she was reclaiming; Menelaus said otherwise – made the couple rich. They had brought with them beautiful vases in gold and silver, worked with all the skill of Cretan craftsmen, dishes of silver, an inlaid table made of many costly woods and much rich clothing. Now mules weighed down with other rich items constantly took the narrow streets up to their house. Helen had twelve women, whose only duty was weaving the fabrics they wore, the hangings for the walls and lovely rugs. She even sent an intelligent slave out to intercept the most recent caravan from the mountainous region of Hattusas, to get first pick of its load.

  I, still the neglected mad daughter most of the time, was forever creeping into the house of Paris and Helen – with Pammon’s dog. I would sit in the hall, listening to the musicians, watching the dancing, gazing at Paris and Helen holding court, leaning together in a large chair, holding their beautifully-chased goblets of wine, speaking affably and affectionately to all those who constituted their unofficial court. These were the young warriors of Troy, gallant men. Paris’ particular friend was Aeneas, who came often, though without his wife, who was my sister, the patient Creusa. He was a handsome man, but I did not trust him. Those of us, and there are few, who have been from the cradle onwards given to visions, learn early about their fellow men and women. We live in the ordinary, the mundane world and the world of visions from infancy on and living like that, one is not a heedless child for long. The effort of finding reality in the midst of dream teaches much and quickly. Thus I mistrusted Aeneas’ smiles, his amiability, his compliments to my brother and his wife. I noticed, too, that Hector and his wife, though welcome, seldom came to Paris and Helen’s house. Hector still disapproved of the union, fearing the consequences. His wife was a quiet and loving woman, mother of a son and not fond of late nights and dancing.

  I loved Paris’ house, though. From the moment you entered their gates at night there was light. Torches flared on all the walls of the courtyard and even from the gates the sound of flutes, drums and cymbals could be heard. Then, as you went through the doors to the main hall, there was more light, the music was louder. There was the smell of meat cooking – how they feasted! – and the odour of women’s scents. A long table contained a seemingly endless banquet Roast meats were brought up throughout the evening. There were spiced stews of lamb. There were salads and bread. There were sweetmeats – platters of toffee, cakes of figs, saffron, honey and nuts. I ate and ate, as a child from a large, frugal household will. There was dancing. Often the men and women were drunk. At the end of the evening, as the music grew faster and the laughter louder, Paris would push me gently from his door. ‘Go home, little sister,’ he would say. ‘It’s late for you now. You must sleep.’

  Paris loved me and noticed my neglected condition, I’m sure, though he did nothing about it Helen feared me. She could not directly object to my presence but she never made me welcome. She remembered too clearly, I knew, my outburst in her room. I must have been a frightful sight for that beautiful and loved woman, every particle of her body groomed and cared for, as I’d stood there in my rough gown, eyes staring, shouting abuse like a skinny rat standing on its hind legs, shrilling and squealing, ready to bite. But I had my evenings at Paris’ house and would stay and stay, until finally I was forced to slip off into the darkness always with Pammon’s long hound beside me, he with h
is stomach swollen with food and usually still holding a bone in his mouth. Then we’d go back to the little stone-floored room I’d once shared with my twin and Adosha, and I would fall asleep on the floor, wrapped in my sheepskin, the dog beside me, crunching noisily on his bone. It sounds desolate, but I was strangely happy.

  Finally, my mother noticed what was happening and realised it was most unfitting for the growing daughter of a king and queen to be skulking round in unclean clothing, hair uncombed and often barefoot, with no attendant and no supervision. She got a slave to give me some lessons in accounts and writing. She began once again to correct my manners – and she got me an attendant – Naomi.

  Naomi came in on Deiphobus’ caravan from Hattusas – the one Helen had intercepted. At first she seemed like a bad joke on a mad princess (and was taken as such by many). She looked like a child of ten, though she must have been older. She was small for her age, and not merely thin, but positively skeletal because of her previous privations. Initially she was dirty with the grime of never having been washed and her hair was so lousy that it would have taken months of attention to get clean, so they tackled the problem in the most radical manner, by shaving her head completely. So there we were – I the undersized and fearsome-eyed child princess attended by a tiny, bald slave who had no language, virtually of any kind, and certainly none of our own.

  She had no idea how to serve others or manage for herself. After the capture in the desert I’ve referred to, under the leader and law-giver (later named for her by the Israelite I’ve mentioned as a certain Moses) she’d been enslaved and brutalised for years. She had been too young when captured to have learned much civilised behaviour and later she had no chance. She ate badly, at first taking her food rapidly into corners as if someone was going to steal it from her, eating furtively and too quickly. She had no conception of pouring water or wine in the proper manner, taking care of clothing or hair or the body. Obviously, she had no domestic skills. But my mother had summed her up correctly, guessing that a child of that age who had even survived the life she’d led must have some form of intelligence, and noting, I’m sure, that the best side of her nature had not been quite destroyed by brutality. How it could have survived, any more than she did, I don’t know.

  She’d been obtained by Deiphobus when he met with a tin-trader from the Black Sea. He’d been heading towards the Hittite capital, a long, troublesome and dangerous journey of about six hundred miles (as the crow flies, more like eight by the easy route). For over a year and a half, when traders came into the port of Troy they had little or no tin with them. They fobbed us off with stories about shortages. Advance messages, appeals, bore no fruit – they still turned up with everything but tin aboard and we were becoming increasingly desperate for the metal. We could not patch our cooking pots, mend or replace knives. The season had come for the repair of ploughs and pruning hooks and scythes. We had lost arrow heads and broken spear tips after the Greek attack, and our store of metal would soon be exhausted. The constituents of bronze are nine parts copper to one of tin, so that, although tin makes up a small part of the metal, it is vitally important. It is also scarce, coming from areas far from civilisation. The Phoenician traders go everywhere to get it, risking voyages even to the lands of the far north, where the seas are always stormy and the sun scarcely sets in winter. We suspected, rightly, as it turned out, that the Greeks had made a contract with the Assyrians to sell them all their stock at high prices – of course they were rich with plunder and could afford this. Since the only other source of tin was Hattusas, Deiphobus, an intelligent and ambitious young man, suggested he would go there and try to make an arrangement for tin with the Great King, Suppiluliumas. This journey ought to have taken a month or more, but in fact he was back within a week, for he had met a caravan from Hattusas, led by a wild and wily Cimmerian and his savage wife. Deiphobus said she had filed teeth and a talent for fortune-telling. The trader, fortunately, was carrying ingots of tin with him.

  There was no danger to Deiphobus as he sat round the campfire with the twenty men and women who constituted the caravan. Traders prefer peace; murder and brigandage convey only short-term advantages. The Cimmerian could make no firm arrangement for supplies of tin – the caravan was somewhat off its usual route, but he was glad to relieve himself of twenty ingots and the waggon and mules carrying them. He made it plain, though, that it would help if Deiphobus took certain other items off his hands at the same time – a dirty wooden box of bits and pieces, lucky items he called them, and a broken waggon of broken-down slaves. Deiphobus agreed, to please the trader and get the tin. The slaves were plainly those who get sold on and on and on because they are too useless or too troublesome. There was a man so old and sick that he died on the way to Troy. There was a tall, mute boy of thirteen (apprenticed to the smith in Troy, he soon grew into a giant and became very useful). There were also two wild men, possibly brothers, whose eyes were so fierce and backs so scarred with beatings that when the waggon broke down yet again, Deiphobus just let them escape. They would have been more trouble than they were worth. And there was Naomi. It is impossible to piece together her career after her capture in Palestine, but she had probably been sold on to Assyrian slave traders. She had been put on some farm in Anatolia where it snowed a lot and the slaves lived in a shed and fought for food from a trough; then she was conveyed elsewhere, to a market-place, put in a fenced compound and resold, with a woman she’d become friendly with, made a long journey to somewhere sounding like a seaport brothel, lost her friend and then went to some other farm where she herded swine with a filthy man who had tried to rape her. Travels, hunger, uncertainty, filthy work and beatings – that had been her life.

  My young sister, kind Polyxena, took her on and taught her what she ought to know. She proved clever and nimble-fingered. She was put to sleep across my doorway and I would watch her wake in the mornings – first she would stir, then, as she woke, she would sit bolt upright, already afraid. Over the months her fear to some extent left her. She took my visions and long silences, away from the world, for granted.

  The first time I left the day for the world of the shades after she arrived, we were both on the ramparts looking out to sea. It was winter and misty, but I saw fire spreading over the surface of the water, ships burning. I think I stood there, mute, eyes unblinking, and screamed. Then I came to myself. Naomi stared at me, head to one side, then all she said was, in her broken tongue, ‘Ah – you dream?’ Someone, my mother or Polyxena, had managed to explain something about my condition to her, I suppose. She only touched my cold arm and led me inside. That was a period, as I say, when I had many visions and Naomi was good to me at that time.

  Eleven

  Thessaly

  And now, twenty years later, this woman Naomi stood against the wall, as I and the Queen of Sparta made our meal. I’d nodded a covert invitation to her to sit down but she’d shaken her head and elected to stand and be a slave. She, a slave, would not sit down with a queen. I had heard many Greeks also hated Helen, especially the women who had lost their menfolk in the war. And both Naomi and I were afraid Helen would put us back into the hands of our old tormentors. But what else did she know, could she guess?

  No wonder the food was sour in my mouth. No wonder Naomi left the room for a moment, feeling the breath of that cursed house of Mycenae in her face again. I expect her memories, like mine, were returning, and I believed she blamed me for beginning to write down my story on those long rolls of papyrus brought at such vast expense from afar. She would be thinking the act of writing had called Helen down on us, like a curse. And perhaps she was right. Perhaps beginning to write this account of the past was like a summoning, such as women do for husbands, missing sons, or to call lovers to them.

  There had been many times when Naomi must have regretted having been made my child-slave and having had to share my bitter fate. She would be regretting it again. She knew I would give her money and let her leave if she wanted to, but that was no
t the point. She had a man and a child here and wanted no more upheavals in her life. She wanted things to stay the same. From the wall behind Queen Helen’s back, she raised both her hands to her chest, shook them up and down, made a pleading, mendicant’s face. I stared. She was insolently mimicking how women approach the fortune-teller in the market-place. She had guessed, as I had, that Helen had come to find out her own future, wanted her fortune told. Naomi ought to have been beaten for it.

  So, I thought, Helen had come from my brother’s farm. There he lived, peacefully at last, with Hector’s widow, that poor woman, first widowed, then bereft of her child in Troy – who could think of Andromache without weeping? They cannot have welcomed Helen’s visit. They had not my reasons for pretending to be someone else, but the attention of princes, or queens, is always dangerous, more so in their position. What had Helenus told her, I wondered? Not enough or not what she wanted – that was why she had come from him to me, through bad weather.

  There was no bread. I called for Naomi. How could I beat her, I thought? I did this rarely, without enthusiasm, and when I did she would turn round as I brought the whip down and sneer at me. How could I beat her for mocking the woman who had brought us all to ruin? Or that was what the ballads said. She brought the bread. We finished our meal, the food bad and the wine sour in both our mouths, I suppose.