Cassandra

by Hilary Bailey

  When I came to myself, I did not know what I had said. Naomi was putting logs on the fire and she had in her hand a goblet of wine, which she gave me. At the same time she hissed, ‘Send her away – or I go.’ Then she retreated to the back of the room again. Helen gazed at me with horror, seeming limp and diminished, leaning back in her chair as if I had struck her a savage blow. When she saw I had finished she remained in that position for a little while, then very quickly recovered her self-possession, sat straight in her chair as before, smiled and began to speak.

  She struck fast and hard. ‘Well, Cassandra. You’ve done your best,’ she said. ‘You were always vindictive. You will never forgive. You will never pardon me for the part I played in the war – and how small it really was – and the part I played in your fate. And if you want a villain,’ she said, almost parenthetically, ‘then I will show you one, one you never suspected. My sister.’ She continued, ‘You, Cassandra, almost alone of your entire family, escaped. You have had a husband, children, bread in your mouth, a roof over your head. The others died, and you know how horrible their deaths were. You did not see your own child’s head smashed against a wall, as Andromache did. You were not cut down at your own altar, as your father was, cruelly slain like your mother. You flinch now – no wonder. Did you live on after the war as a beaten slave, like the other Trojans? Remember – my family was destroyed too, after the war, but you, almost alone in all this, have lived in peace for all these years. And still you cannot give up your spite. Where some now mourn, understand and accept the inevitability of things, you still live in hate and blame, striking like a little brown snake in the undergrowth, knowing nothing but that it must inject its venom into something – or someone. You,’ she told me, ‘are low, contemptible, mean, unforgiving, impious, vengeful.’

  I was tired, as those are who have given out a prophecy, and her words were hard, even harder because I recognised some truth in them. They echoed some of my long, bitter thoughts. Why had I survived when my family and friends had died? Why, when the remnants of my people lived on as slaves or wanderers was I still living in peace and safety? Why could I not accept what had happened? Not believe that fate, which makes of us what it will, had had a hand in the disaster, that whatever we had done we were only carrying out what fate had planned? Perhaps I should have taken vengeance on some of those who had conducted the war (Helen herself?) and died as a result, or taken my own life and joined the others in the afterlife. I had not. Perhaps I had been protecting the child which then lay in my womb. Perhaps that was not the real, whole answer.

  I hung my head, tired, ashamed, self-doubting. Her words had struck home, whether she spoke truly or only to punish me for what I had told her. In any case, she had not believed me. It did not matter to me whether she did or not. Perhaps next day, I thought, I would tell her what I knew she wanted to hear – that she would soon find a new love, a new king, a new capture by a lover who would take her from a man she did not love and circumstances she did not like. That was how it had always been for her, since she had been little more than a child. Men seized Helen and took her away. Her beauty shaped her destiny. But who was the caught, who the captive, in the end? So I could tell her what she wanted, that it would be like that for her again, though, if I did, she would go away, which I dearly wanted her to do. Meanwhile I was afraid Naomi would carry out her threat, and leave me. Indeed, it was not beyond her to poison Helen.

  Helen, like me, had lost a sister as the consequence of war. In that, at any rate, we were alike. She had said, ‘If you want to find a villain I will show you one you never suspected – my sister Clytemnestra.’ She had, of course, visited her sister many times during the seven years after the war, when Clytemnestra was alive and reigning in Mycenae with her lover.

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked. So that evening and for the whole of the next day, in the farmhouse with snow falling outside, she told me Clytemnestra’s tale of the wars in Troy. As she spoke I seemed to hear Clytemnestra’s own voice, seemed to be listening, with horror, to the actual tones of that dead, dreadful queen.

  Part Two

  Fifteen

  Mycenae, Summer

  Every ten days or so a messenger comes from Troy. The siege has been going on now for six months, since spring – since my daughter died. ‘Lady Clytemnestra–’ they always begin, on their knees in the dark, gilded magnificence of the great hall of Mycenae. It is a room I hate, huge, hung with loot, a room for men to feast in.

  ‘Lady Clytemnestra–’ they say. Then follows a tale of defeat, or half-success, a request for more men, supplies, horses. The war drags on. If it had gone according to the Greek nobles’ confident plan it would have been over by now, but our beached ships still lie drawn up, two-deep across the bay of Troy. Our cavalry is still harrying the other cities of the coast and the farms behind the city. Each day Trojans and Greeks clash on the plain in front of Troy. And Troy still stands. The Trojan warriors hurl themselves from their city, determined to make us board our ships and go away, while our force tries to beat them back and drive through the gates into the city. There have been many deaths and woundings. So far, from what the messengers tell me, however guardedly, I see the Trojans have the best of it, and they are not so distressed by the siege that they will surrender the city.

  Here women, boys and old people are cutting the hay, picking what grapes and figs are ripe, getting the wheat and barley planted.

  These messengers arrive at our great, high-walled palace, weary and travel-dazed after long journeys. It is two days from Troy with a good wind, one even with a wind desperately strong and a bold captain, but more likely three or four. They come, war-stained and travel-stained, telling me of battles, men dead and wounded. They always ask for more supplies of clothing, armour, weapons, horses, drugs, healing herbs and food. These I supply without question as fast as possible, though our own stores are becoming depleted and I shall be obliged soon to start buying all these things from traders and foreign rulers, who will ask high prices, knowing our need. The resources of all areas of the country, the Epirus, Thessaly, Euboea, Boetia, Messenia, Attica, Sparta, which we call Laconia, have, to a greater or lesser extent, funded the war we are conducting, apparently to take revenge against Troy on account of my sister’s ‘capture’. We aim to take Troy, establish control of the coast and gain access to all the mainland’s wealth and trade. Not just the mainland rulers but warriors from the islands – Crete and Rhodes being the most significant – are involved in this venture. All have raided their own treasuries to build ships and equip troops. Some, like Nestor of Pylos, could pay for two wars and still remain rich. Others, from rocky islands, have used up all they have, gambling on victory, fame for the warriors, loot and new territories to control. By and large Greece is a poor country. We have too many mountains and too little water for easy prosperity. We are far from the trade routes connecting the vast empires across the sea. But we are ambitious and look outwards for our wealth. We have no advantages but our strength and resolution.

  Peiros, a young man, died raving on his farm near Corinth the other day, a month after he had been shipped home to his mother, widowed a year ago. The young man’s leg mortified and could not be cleansed. His mother came to me in tears. She has another son out there in Troy and pleaded to know if the men would come back before winter. Her son had told her the army might stay on all year, into spring if necessary, until the Trojan resistance was battered down by casualties and siege conditions in the city, and they surrendered or were vanquished in a final decisive battle they were too weak to win.

  When she arrived, I was alone in my chamber, a cool wind coming through the window at midday. She was awed by my grandeur, my bed, inlaid with many kinds of wood, my carved ivory chest, the rich hangings on the walls, the golden comb, the silver bowls.

  The woman wept. She feared to lose another son. The land could not be worked without men. ‘They must come home,’ she said, distressed. ‘There will be sickness there in Troy. More will be kil
led. The land here will go to waste with no one to work it.’

  I told her, ‘This is war. It is not pleasant. All must suffer, the men at war and those at home. I have lost a daughter in this cause, you a son. When the men come home in triumph we will rejoice, too, whatever our losses. The future of our people lies on that rich coast We must be brave.’

  She was not comforted. I did not intend her to be. She asked desperately, ‘But, lady, will they return soon?’

  I told her I did not know, which was true. I told her, ‘If we knew the plan, the Trojans would soon get to hear of it. There are spies everywhere. We are women. We must wait.’

  She, too, waited, as if I could add more to what I had said – some news or perhaps word of condolence for her loss. But I turned to my loom, where I had begun my fine and splendid web, and said, ‘Go home, good woman, and do your duty. This is what we must all do, high and low. See, I am weaving a cloak for my husband’s return. Do the same for your son. It will distract you, calm and comfort you during the long winter evenings if the warriors do not return. Make clothes for the children your son’s wife will bear.’

  So she went off, unhappily. As she left, she glanced up at my face, while bowing low, and I saw alarm when her eyes met mine. She was in that state of grief and fear which will often produce, even in the most mundane person, an extra sensitivity to what is truly happening and what is passing through the mind of another. What she saw on the surface was her queen, gracious and composed in a flounced dress, bare-bosomed after the Cretan style, in a tall headdress, seated straight in a high-backed chair inlaid with ivory, by a window through which a cool breeze blew, though it was midday. Beyond the window a small courtyard, with a flowering tree. She saw her queen, tall, brown-haired, blue-eyed, thirty-two years old and beautiful, though not beautiful enough – no woman, twin sister of Helen of Sparta, could ever be beautiful enough, had never been, from the cradle on, never would be, even if Helen herself was dead and her bones in a burial mound. But the woman at that moment saw beyond all this grandeur to something which disconcerted, even frightened her. So the homespun woman met a queen in her pride and read in her eyes – anger, my anger, always continuing anger, the fury of a maimed wolf. It is never appeased. I do not want it appeased. I want no peace of mind, reconciliation, nothing of that – only for my rage to maintain itself, grow with waiting – until I take my revenge, as I surely will. No wonder the widow flinched. One day she will tell her friends she knew, she guessed, she suspected what the queen was like. Indeed, she will say, she almost predicted what would happen. That will amuse her – it will be nothing to me.

  And meanwhile I am waiting for the next messenger, held up by unfavourable winds. He is due soon. Instead my steward, Pandion, comes in – a Greek name, but he is pure Cretan, small, very handsome, intelligent, with large shining eyes. In his hands he carries a clay tablet, damp and shining, in case I wish him to make notes or write a letter. He reports on his trip west into our lands bordering Messenia – says the lads on the frontier have become warlike, have armed themselves and are raiding the farms on either side, bullying the defenceless women, taking sheep and wine. There are protests that nothing is being done to protect them; they declare they will pay no tribute.

  I shall, I tell Pandion, ask my husband’s cousin to go there with a small force of troops and settle the matter. I appointed this man, Pandion, steward after my husband left for Troy, saying the old steward was too elderly and aching in the bones to cope with the kind of situations likely to arise when my lord was absent This was untrue. The old steward was too loyal to Agamemnon so I had to get rid of him.

  Pandion, only twenty years old, merely nods. He already knows more than he would ever dare say. He knows, too, that he knows too much. If he ever told any of it he would be lucky to escape with his life, let alone the money with which I reward him and which I believe he saves. No doubt he plans to buy land in Crete eventually and go back there to live prosperously with his family. These Cretans are very clever, as clerks and craftsmen, and we pay them well. I think he had parents and a sister in Crete and will go back to them. The native Cretans regard us covertly as barbarians, though we have ruled them for generations. They see us as crude in all our ways, lacking taste and scholarship and worshipping gods which provide no proper framework for our lives. They do not understand that although we lust for gold and domination we also lust for beauty. It is a passion with us. We are slaves to the frescoes with which they decorate our walls, their engraved rings, their vases, all they offer us. They make our images of the gods.

  I myself hold no brief for the Greek gods, these dozen or so deities whose lives develop like characters in a saga – who said what, who married whom, betrayed, tricked another. I have no objection to them either. In our temple-rooms their scowling pottery images, larger than the usual images of the gods, stand in a shrine for those who wish to offer to them. Elsewhere there are the images of Potnia, the goddess, and the frieze of goddesses painted by some long-dead Cretan – it is of no real interest what or who is worshipped, except that I fear for the little pottery goddess – Potnia – in her shrine.

  There is something too useful about this other, newer pantheon. They separate man from the cycle of life. They reflect all too clearly the life of the state, and government – the powerful leader, head of the family, Zeus, Hera, the subordinate queen to Zeus, the family, the children, the alliances, the quarrels. These are the gods of those who do not humble themselves to other forces. Their gods reflect them – they must be the gods and the gods must be them. This is why I fear for the little goddess. Of course, the people have not wholly adopted this new religion. In time of crisis it is to them that the people turn – to the females of the pantheon, Athena, Demeter and the others, for they are really old goddesses of beasts and trees and plants. Even my husband, Agamemnon, did so. At the behest, he said, of a goddess, he sacrificed our daughter to the wind at Aulis so that his fleet could sail for Troy. Desperate to set sail, he believed then that the forces of nature, sea and wind, could be placated with a sacrifice. They had sacrificed beasts in plenty, but still the hostile north wind blew. So they took a human being, my daughter, and impiously killed her without her mother’s knowledge.

  It is for this crime that Agamemnon must die. He deceived me. A messenger came from Aulis, the small haven in Boetia where the fleet had assembled. The message from my husband told me falsely that he had arranged a good marriage for Iphegenia to that mighty madman Achilles. I knew my daughter, being fifteen, should be married and did not object. Achilles was rich and would be kind to her, as kind as any prince to his wife, perhaps kinder. And we needed Achilles for the war.

  I told Iphegenia to go, saying, if she did not like the match, she must return. I packed her waggon with splendid goods. She put her own small things in a bag – some jewellery, a small chipped statue of a goddess she had had since childhood, a fine linen scarf, woven for her by her sister, dyed in the best Tyrean purple dye, that dark red-blue we prize. She set off, a tall, strong girl of fifteen, accompanied by her women servants and some armed men. But the threat to her was not robbers, nor jealous neighbours. It was her father, though I did not know it. And so I and her brother and sister kissed her and sent her off down the long road from the palace. Half a mile off, where the road bent, taking her out of sight, she turned and waved. This was the last time I ever saw her. Even now, I try not to look down that road – and if I do, I weep.

  A week passed, then another and there was no message. At Aulis there were a thousand men, some hundred noblemen, fathers and sons, the rest being their kinsmen, their tenants and their sons, and even a few reliable slaves who had been offered land if the Greeks took Troy. With them they had horses, chariots, mules, carts, provisions – and ships. In the narrow straits between Euboea and the mainland fifty-seven ships, the biggest fleet, surely, ever assembled, shifted at anchor, beaten by wind and waves as they had been for a month, waiting for the wind to change. Not one day of that month had p
assed without the whole force examining the skies at dawn and dusk, looking for a change in the weather to see if at last they could set sail for Troy. But the wind stayed north. The camp stretched round the bay. The men were crowded into tents or roughly constructed shacks, some slept in the rocks – no one could have believed they would be there for so long.

  No provision had been made for the delay. They had set out from their islands, their farms, manors, palaces all over the mainland, imagining that in a few days they would be in Troy. That high spirit had changed, becoming dangerous. Men who expect to fight, and do not, are like men who expect to take a woman who evades them. They rage or become bitter. Thus Agamemnon was faced with a mighty expedition going sour. The men were packed together at close quarters, in a state of discontent. They drank, quarrelled with each other, became apathetic and cynical. Stationary troops are vulnerable, too, in other ways. Messages from home reach them – their wives or parents speak of difficulties, of missing them, of crying children wanting their fathers. They begin to long for home. If they do not worry because they get messages, they worry because they get none. They fear disaster and the unfaithfulness of their wives. In short, all the matters which did not concern them unduly when setting off overwhelmed with the desire for riches and glory in battle, suddenly came back to mind. It’s a short step then to declaring they must go home. The expedition breaks up.

  Agamemnon consulted Calchas, the oracle, and Calchas told him the sacrifice required would have to be the most serious a man can make – the sacrifice of his child. So he sent for Iphegenia, saying she was going to be married, and one night, they told me, with the wind blowing clouds over the sky, using a flat rock by the sea as an altar, Agamemnon, my husband, her father, slew Iphegenia. I hope they drugged her. I hope they did not wake her, then pull her screaming with fear across the beach, force her across the stone, slay her as she struggled and pleaded with her killers – with her father, who held the knife. I hope she never knew who the man was who cut her throat. I hope she did not look into his face as he brought the knife down, knowing who he was, and, though unbelieving, have to believe what was happening. Poor Iphegenia. Merry, thoughtful, dreamy Iphegenia. Her father killed her to get a favourable wind for Troy.