Cassandra

by Hilary Bailey

  I led the Phoenician captain up the winding streets to the palace, where I could find him food. We passed the gates of Helen and Paris’ house. They were wide open, the guards were missing and nothing stirred, though somewhere inside a man was striking some chords on a lute. I greeted Advenor, who was going into the stables with a bucket in each hand. He was in no mood for conversation. Hector’s gates were closed and there was no one to be seen through the bars, just an empty courtyard where a dog roamed and drank from a puddle.

  Inside the palace an exhausted old woman was kneading dough on a table and a couple of slaves with brushes were trying to sweep the debris – eggshells, bones, puddles of wine – from the great hall. The old woman glanced at me as I came in hand-in-hand with the Phoenician. ‘This man, Arvad, a Phoenician captain, has been shipwrecked,’ I said. ‘Is there any food to give him?’ My dog appeared, muddy, wagging his tail. He’d got lost during the ceremonies and had found his way back.

  The woman got some old bread, hard as a stone, and produced half a jug of barely drinkable wine. We sat at the long table. Arvad unquestioningly took the goblet I gave him, dipped his bread in it and ate. At the other end of the table a huge man I did not recognise lay asleep, half naked and covered in mud. As Arvad ate I stared at him and he at me. Naomi stumbled in and pulled at the Phoenician’s sleeve, staring up inquisitively. He broke off a piece of bread, dipped it in his wine and offered it to her. She took it and ate, but it was reassurance, not the appeasement of hunger she craved. She went to get wood for the fire.

  Gradually the household revived. My father came in and I served him wine. My mother was with the oracle and would not be seen that day, perhaps for several days. She was queen, but priestess also, and in some manner, at some times, also the goddess herself, so after the ceremonies a period of cleansing and consultation with the oracle was her portion. When she returned to the palace there would be a strange aura about her and she would be treated differently for some days, until it seemed right for her to return to her usual life.

  So I sat in silence with the Phoenician while others, also silently, entered the hall, were given what food and wine there was. Naomi lit the fire. A waggon creaked into the courtyard outside.

  Then I led the Phoenician up to the little room I had once shared with Helenus and Adosha. There were some damp rugs lying in a corner, otherwise nothing but a stone floor, a tiny window through which a little sun came. There we made love again. ‘Well, Alba,’ said Arvad with some scepticism, ‘I’ll sleep now.’ He closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep. I remained awake for a while, looking at him. My heart was filled with fierce desire and hope. Yet I was not as happy as I might have been. A corner of my mind was dark with fear. Perhaps it was the ordinary fear of a lover, the fear that happiness will not last. Perhaps it was a deeper feeling. But I pushed the fear from me, denied it, fell asleep. I was unaware of Naomi coming in, but she must have done so, for when we awoke some ten hours later, at dusk, she was there, lying across the doorway, eyes open, staring up at the ceiling. By then there was the smell of roasting meat, and voices and sounds. Someone was playing a lyre.

  When we descended, the great hall was full. The table was crowded, there were people on stools, people round the fire. Some sat or leaned against the walls. The musician’s song was being half-drowned by those further away from him who were talking. There was even a tumbler turning cartwheels in a small space on the floor, while his companion passed through the company, his hand out for money.

  Naomi nudged a couple of merchants from their places at the end of the table, pointing at me and gabbling what she had picked up of our language, interspersed with her own tongue, or that of her captors. As she worried at them one noted the Phoenician and stood. He greeted him and we both took seats. The merchant and Arvad began a conversation in traders’ speech – that strange language with words drawn from the Phoenician, Assyrian and some from a forgotten language of earlier times, I suppose. It is a language common to seamen and traders from Scythia to the African coast It surprised me for some reason that the men knew each other, though it was not so very remarkable. Phoenicia is a narrow strip of the Mediterranean coast, very beautiful by all accounts, and the men are merchants, seamen, often pirates. They voyage everywhere. They know all men and all customs.

  I had found the man I had seen in dreams and visions, the man I desired but I had not from the moment of meeting been clear about whether he had the same feelings for me, or was just a shipwrecked sailor, stunned by ill fortune and taking what he could get – a woman, a meal, a bed – in the spirit of a permanent voyager, a man who makes port and trusts his luck among strangers. I did not know and I did not ask. I felt myself, yet I was changed. I felt disturbed to my very roots, yet I was calm. The fate I had not known was now revealed to me. I would not marry a king, or a neighbour or join the oracle in her cave, or bear a child to the goddess, conceived at the temple during the ceremonies – I would go with the Phoenician on his ship. If I bore children, they would be his. My life lay in Sidon or in Tyre.

  I did not owe these perceptions to my prophetic gifts. They were the ordinary hopes of a young girl who had fallen in love. I had seen the fate of my people, and my own fate at the hands of the Greek king in trances and visions, but I was a girl. I denied the visions and pretended to myself they were not true.

  Meanwhile Arvad, though his manner was modest, was soon at the centre of a conversation involving many people. The Phoenicians do not fight for territory. Their cities lie along a hundred and fifty miles of coast but on the whole they hold only enough land to supply them. They do not attack their neighbours – the Philistines, who share the coast with them, the Assyrian and Hittite kingdoms on their other side, or the peoples beyond the hills and mountains at their back – the Israelites, Moabites, Edomites and such. Instead, they are sailors and merchants looking out to sea, trading and plundering over a thousand miles north, south, east and west of their homes. Their merchandise is spices grown beside the Euphrates, wool from Greece and Sicily, purple dye from Cyprus, Scythian silver, African gold, Egyptian linen and paper, as well as the ordinary commodities – corn, wine, figs, honey. Those who are not sailors work in metals – they are skilful craftsmen and of course have access to all the places where metals are to be found. Because of these voyages the Phoenicians carry from place to place another commodity besides cargoes – this is news.

  Arvad told the company more of the new Hittite king’s campaigns at sea, to wrest his territories in the east back from the Assyrians, and of his troubles with the savage Gasga people on his other border around and beyond the Black Sea. His words suggested that the new king was a bold and clever man, but would be hard put to stop the rot of empire begun in the times of his predecessor. Arvad himself had set out in the last days of winter with a view to ending up in the Black Sea, getting copper, silver and tin from among the Cimmerians (and rare furs from the Scythians, he added), but heard now there was trouble there and even when his ship was repaired, he might have to think again about the trading trip.

  Hector said urgently, ‘We need iron. Can you get us some?’

  Arvad’s face stiffened a little. ‘It is difficult,’ he said. ‘You would do better to go to the source.’ He meant the Hittite king. ‘We traders dislike war,’ he said, with a glance at my brother Hector. ‘Though we see enough of it.’ Hector nodded.

  Arvad said he had left Tenedos where he had exchanged corn for Greek gold. It was then that he had been hit by the freak storm, wrecked on the short trip between the island and our coast. The population, he said, was not discontented now. Achilles had gone home but had left another Thessalian in charge, a reasonable man with no more than the usual taste for seizing the goods of others and sending them back to Greece. The Thessalians, though an army of occupation, had hung up their weapons for the most part, were forming unions with the daughters of the more prosperous citizens and some of them were taking to the plough. He gave this information tactfully, knowing our pos
ition.

  Deiphobus burst out that we should launch an offensive and retake the island. I was surprised that without agreeing directly, Arvad seemed to support his view – these Phoenicians have to speak diplomatically, trading always among warring nations as they do. I think now we should perhaps have attacked the Greeks earlier, when they were divided – but war is all blunder and mistakes, and fate always has the casting vote.

  Arvad then civilly broke away. He had left his wrecked ship and those sailors who had survived the storm in a bay beyond Troy. He said he must now return and make provision for them. Could he buy from us what he needed – supplies for the men and timber for the repair of the ship? There was no question of that, my father responded. He and his men were our guests. The men must come to the city where they would be taken care of. This gesture of kindness and hospitality proved that my father had seen in Arvad a man of substance, notwithstanding his worn and battered clothing. He had assessed him as someone it would not only be appropriate, but possibly useful, to assist. And with that Arvad took my hand and we left the hall together.

  Naomi, who did not want to be left behind anyway, saw it would be suitable for me to be accompanied by a servant, so she swirled a red cloak, an old one Polyxena had given her, round her shoulders, called for my own cloak, which someone ran to fetch and stepped after us with dignity. People had to move aside to allow the Phoenician, the princess and her small bald attendant to leave. It must have been a strange sight. The lyre player broke off as we departed. My dog trotted after us in a proud, orderly way, as if he had duties to perform.

  We got horses and blankets and made our way down from the city, took the road to the harbour, then turned right and rode along the beach, splashed through the shallows of the river to the next bay. We rounded the rocks to where a ship lay on its side, stranded, black in the faint light from the sky. Its prow leaned into the rocks on which it had crashed. At first there seemed to be no one there but, as we approached, the dark outlines of men began to rise from the side of the boat where they had been sheltering. Others began to come down towards us from the caves above the beach. There were only eight crewmen, all that remained of fifteen who had set out from Sidon a month earlier. Two were Africans so black you could not see them well in the darkness. Arvad spoke to them and, wrapped in blankets, they began to trudge along the beach and back to the city, weary and discouraged.

  Arvad and I remained on the beach, looking out to sea. I did not speak at first. It is a sad thing for a captain to wreck his ship and lose good men. He often blames himself for the loss, whether he is responsible or not When I thought the moment good I told him who I was, which I do not think surprised him by then, and probably would not have done earlier. I told him the truth too, about myself, that I had the gift of prophecy but it was often a fateful gift, for I was not believed. I was inwardly nervous but betrayed no shame for I was after all a princess.

  He must have seen that I was afraid he would reject me, for he only said that in his experience many women had fatal gifts but rarely explained them so clearly to others from the outset. For his part he respected and cherished the presence of the gods, wherever and however they manifested themselves, and so did all his people. He added, perhaps complacently, that once happily married to him, a power which had proved burdensome might adapt itself into a happier form.

  I questioned this, even then, to myself, but said nothing of my doubts. He might have been right for all I know. I was never to find out. As I record this almost-forgotten story, I must admit I almost weep for my younger self. It is painful to see again, from the outside, those two figures agreeing their future, hand-in-hand, looking out over the dark waves of the Aegean.

  For the three weeks it took to repair the ship I was completely happy. My mother came from her retirement, pale and thin, and agreed to the marriage. It was a strange turn of events, but she was pleased, and so was my father. Arvad and I lived sometimes at the palace, sometimes in a hut on the beach near to where the ship was being repaired. The weather was warm. We cooked fish the men caught over a fire. They wandered to and from the ship while carpenters rebuilt half the hull, put in new planks and masts, tarred and caulked and hammered. So we walked, talked, made love and decided our future. It was agreed that he would return for me towards the end of summer, after his voyage north to the Black Sea, which, he said, would be profitable if there was no war. He planned to go into the lands of the Cimmerians, nomads, he said, who travelled vast grassy plains with their flocks, and who were extraordinary horsemen and good breeders of horses. I wanted to go with him but he said he was uncertain of what he would encounter. It might be dangerous and my parents would prefer me to stay with them, just for a few months.

  The contrast between those days and what followed after fills me, as I have said, with unhappiness, even now. If I had gone with him I would have seen Thebes, Memphis and many other great cities, had a happy life. After he left without me, ruin came to me, to all of us.

  I have survived, salvaged a sort of calm, the life of a hardy farmer’s widow, children grown, carrying hay to the stable, delivering a lamb by night in a field, by torchlight, breaking the ice of the well in winter to get water. Well, that life is better than that of many others of my people, but when I remember what I felt as I watched the Phoenician ship bound off, sails filled with wind on the spring day when Arvad sailed, I am filled with regret and sadness.

  By summer we were blockaded, the city under siege. The Greeks controlled the harbour so no ship could come near it By the next spring I was married, not willingly, to an ally’s son, so that my father-in-law would keep his warriors fighting alongside ours. In short, we were at war, and the first sacrifices of war are the ordinary satisfactions of life. Each one has his own – a child, a hoard of silver hidden in a wall, a husband, a wife, a horse, a field, an orchard. When war comes, the silver is looted, the child or the husband dies, the wife starves, the farm is burnt, the horses stolen.

  On my wedding morning I skulked through the countryside behind the city, looking out for Greek patrols with the dog, Smiler. I climbed the hill and on the other side, just at the boundary of the little farm which would have been my dowry, I got away from him as fast as possible, clapping my heels to my donkey’s flanks and as I scrambled back up the hill I threw stones at the poor dog as he tried to follow me. Finally, he stopped running and stood stock-still on the path as I went over the brow of the hill. When I looked back over my shoulder I saw him standing there gazing at me, bewildered, still wagging his tail slightly, believing it was a game he didn’t understand, that somehow, it would be all right again. I raced downhill, the donkey scattering stones all over the place. I didn’t care if we both tumbled over the side or were caught by a Greek patrol. We had eaten the horses. We were eating dogs by then. I’d had to get Smiler out of the city. It wouldn’t have been long before he would have been caught and eaten too. War isn’t noble and grand. People hunger, quarrel and rage – and eat dogs.

  I will not name my husband – poor man, he died in battle a week later. I was a widow before the first clothes I washed for him had dried. On my wedding night, my husband on top, puffing and blowing, I tried to forget the dog and, all the time, I thought of Arvad and held in my hand the pearl he had given me.

  Fourteen

  Thessaly

  This tale of Arvad the Phoenician and of my lost future with him explains why when Helen, radiant with her memories, told me I had never loved, I, hard-handed farmer’s widow in a rough country, just gazed at her – and assented. I had no wish to tell her my little story. Hers was the great fable, the one of which the ballads spoke. Because of it the Greeks attacked and the Phoenician never returned. Perhaps he could have risked his life to rescue me, perhaps he went back to a wife in Sidon, perhaps he died among the Cimmerians or the fierce Gasga people – I have no insight. I doubt if I will ever find out. Helen would not have been interested in my tale anyway. She had come to me for a reason and it was not to discuss old times and
old loves, as women do round the fire at night before it burns to the embers and they retire, knowing the next day will bring the crying child, the burnt meat, the broken jug, the irritable husband, the web spoiled on the loom. No – Helen was sitting there by my fire willing me to tell her fortune.

  Naomi had come in quietly and was sitting, straight-faced and straight-backed, against the wall and it was partly to avenge her – for her capture by the Greeks, for torture, rape, the Greek child she had borne and strangled – that I told Helen what pictures I had of her future, visions I felt my brother Helenus must also have had, but had been too kind to reveal. Or perhaps it was not just a malign impulse to wound the woman who had wounded so many (she had not dared show her face publicly in Greece after the war for many years – the Greek women would have stoned her for the loss of their menfolk) but just the descent of the goddess, imparting the oracular voice which cannot be resisted. At any rate, as I began to speak, and before I lost any sense of what I was saying, I caught my own voice deepening and taking on that tone, both rhythmic and monotonous, characteristic of the prophetic statement Then I became unconscious of what I was saying, as seers do. It was from Naomi I heard, next day, exactly what I told the Queen of Sparta.

  ‘Helen – your husband is nearing death, as you suspect None of his excesses – wine, boys, the torture of women – will arrest it What he thinks of as a cure is only accelerating his death. As soon as you are without his protection the Spartans will turn against you, headed by your own daughter and her husband the King of Mycenae. You will wander from place to place, finding no haven. No one will take you in. You will wander from island to island, prostitute yourself in the ports of Tyre and Sidon, wander on, end up begging your bread in the streets of Thebes, being pelted by little boys, abused by strangers, sleeping in the corners of the walls, friendless and alone, and your death will come swinging hanged from a tree, far away from home.’