Cassandra

by Hilary Bailey

  Then, from nowhere on that road, a band of Hittite horsemen galloped past us. They must have come down from the hills behind. They were little, wiry men in dun-coloured trousers and boots. They had round, bronze breastplates and practical-looking pointed helmets with earflaps. They rode sturdy little shaggy horses. We tried to stop them, but they were past us and round a bend in the road in a flash. It was an encouragement, though. We must be on the road to somewhere.

  Further encouragement came. The rain stopped, the air became clearer and a pale blue sky emerged. Then we found ourselves travelling beside a broad river. There was a hamlet, where I saw a woman in a green-dyed cloak, and a child with a wooden toy by the roadside. I took these things as sure signs that we were near a city. Then, on the horizon, were great walls seeming to have been carved from the hillside rock. Gordion was a forbidding city, if you were not looking at it with the eyes of hope, as I was. Then suddenly other travellers appeared as if by magic – a woman pushing a cart containing a heap of big, unfamiliar-looking green vegetables and a bawling sheep on its side with its feet tied, a couple of young men, one riding a donkey, the other walking, a waggon driven by a man in a sheepskin with three soldiers in the back, a man carrying nothing but a lute.

  This appearance of other individuals made me realise the state we were in. The waggon was inches deep in water. Naomi and Nisintas were slumping. I was drenched and freezing. (Our clothes were far too light. It is impossible for lowlanders to believe how tough garments must be to protect them in those regions.) Suddenly self-conscious, I realised we were reaching an important Hittite city on an important mission and I was wet, exhausted, dirty, riding a tired, plodding horse with its head down. And so we reached the giant stone portals of the city and passed through its great gates.

  The streets were broad and level, stone buildings lay to either side. A vast temple with two great statues of the weather god and sun goddess stood directly inside the city gates. From inside the temple came a roaring of voices. I never fully understood that religion, except that it revolved around the god and goddess and their two children, named by more than one name. They had ceremonies in spring and autumn, as all do. Their king is also a god, but often consults local oracles or village witches to answer problems or find out what course to take.

  I rode up to a cluster of soldiers, standing around doing nothing, as soldiers often seem to, and asked for the palace of Estan, prince of the kingdom. My mother had told me he was named after Estan, the Hittite war-god. She had told me all she knew of the names and natures of those that I must approach in this city, but it was far off and information scanty. One man she had asked, who had met Estan, called him honest and methodical.

  I had no royal appurtenances, of course. I was sixteen years old, riding a useful, but undistinguished horse and, for a cloak, I wore the sole blanket we had managed to keep dry. Everything else was wet. My entourage was two damp slaves in a mule-cart. But calculating, I expect, that no one but a noblewoman would have dared make the request, two of the soldiers fell in and led the way to Estan’s palace.

  I was awed by the streets we went through. They were crowded, wide and full of buildings larger than anything I had ever seen before. This solidity of stone, lacking beauty or grace, was a visible sign of power and wealth. And if this city was subsidiary to Hattusas, the capital, then what could Hattusas itself be like? Here were temple after temple, chariots in huge numbers. Here women wore jewellery which we would have locked away in treasure chests; wealth was everywhere.

  We entered a vast portal with stone lions set on pillars thirty feet high. It must have been a quarter of a mile, through many courtyards, to the palace itself. One was surrounded by buildings, where clerks went in and out; another was full of carts, waggons and chariots; one was a whole market-place, where vendors sold fish, meat and strange vegetables.

  We went through more great pillars to an atrium where a soldier went off and spoke to an official in a long robe and pointed hat. Not long after I was ushered into the presence of Estan. He sat at a long table, surrounded by some robed men. On the table were scrolls of papyrus, inscribed stone tablets and beside him, while everyone, it seemed, was speaking at once, stood a clerk with a frame containing soft clay on which he was writing rapidly with a wooden stylus. At Estan’s end of the table was a heap of sand, which he was, as I came in, sweeping flat with his hand, obliterating some sketch he had made, and preparing to redraw it.

  Estan himself was a small, thin man, with sharp eyes. I needed his support, since he would, I felt sure, send a messenger to Hattusas ahead of me, concerning my visit. However, I was not presenting myself well. Dirty and ill-clad as I was, I had been offered no chance to change my clothes; nor, apparently, had Estan bothered to prepare a meeting of nobles, as I expected. I was being brought into a conference as it was taking place, rather as if I’d come to deliver a roll of cloth, not as an emissary from a far-off city under siege.

  However, he greeted me very cordially, though I saw curiosity under his polite manner. He left his table and gestured me towards a central fire burning in the room. Chairs were brought. Two people followed him to the fire – his clerk, who took a position behind him, still carrying his clay tablet and stylus, and an elderly woman with grey hair, wearing a long brown dress and cloak, who sat on one of the chairs.

  Estan did not say who she was. I was ignorant of their customs. The woman could have been his mother, sister, or his first and oldest wife. She had a keen but friendly eye and wore very costly earrings containing thumbnail-sized red stones set in gold. I believe the stones were rubies. I spoke to him in the Hittite tongue, of course, and there seemed no point in concealing my mission, since I guessed, as soon as I had left the palace, he would launch a man on a fast horse with a message for Hattusas.

  These encounters between dignitaries have their rituals – an exchange of compliments is followed by an exchange of information, and, finally, an intimation of the point of the visit, usually guessed by the host during the preliminaries. The visits from the Greek kings had not taken this form, but they felt no need to observe the normal rules, if, in fact, they knew them.

  I outlined the state of affairs in Troy, although I knew they must have other reports. I mentioned my encounter with Queen Laodice at Brusa and said I thought her mind might be turning towards alliance with the Greeks. I added that I considered this to be grave news for the Great King, who of course wished to maintain his influence in that area. I did not need to point out that aid to Troy from Suppiluliumas would soon help her to work out where her best interests lay. All this time Estan turned his neutral, restrained face to mine. His eyes met mine firmly, as did those of the woman.

  I was afraid that during the long days of my journey, events would have become much worse in Troy, and knew that news might have reached here before I did. Mercifully, Estan had nothing to tell me. Nor, of course, could he make any offer of assistance – that was a matter for the Great King to decide. He did not seem unsympathetic, though. Where Laodice had plainly been trifling with the notion of alliance with the Greeks, Estan was against them and expressed what looked like sincere distress about our difficulties. It would not have been diplomatic to mention Suppiluliumas’ previous refusal to send troops, but I began to hope there had been a change of policy. They might already have received news the Greeks could win the war and have suddenly appreciated the danger enemies planted on the mainland could represent for them.

  Estan said bluntly, ‘You have taken risks in coming here alone, with only two slaves, as I think you said. A truly Trojan measure. You must have an escort for the rest of your journey.’

  The woman then spoke: ‘We have heard of you, Cassandra. Is it not true that you and your twin have prophesied the fate of the city?’

  ‘I have, I know,’ I said. ‘But not all prophecies are true.’

  She gave me a shrewd look – these people were very direct – stood up and said, ‘Will you come with me? You must stay and rest.’ I received th
e impression she was Estan’s mother, a figure of some power. She led me from the vast hall across a courtyard, up a huge flight of steps, through a vast portico. She pushed through a tapestried hanging. ‘Your apartments,’ she said. ‘Your woman will be sent to you. The other slave will be looked after.’ There was a set of interconnected rooms, well furnished and with hangings of unusual, bold design on walls and floors. The ceiling was painted blue. None the less these high, rich rooms were dark, dark because of leaden skies overhead and because a sombre pall lay over this palace, and the city itself.

  There she left me. I walked through the first room into the bedroom, gazed down from the window to a courtyard below, where fifty bowmen were practising with their short, arched bows under the grey skies. They were quick, nimble men, and well trained. With fifty such men and a troop of well-trained cavalry, I thought, we could take the Greeks by surprise, and finish them.

  I longed now to be back in Troy, whatever its woes. I ached for the familiar stones of the city, for my parents, Helenus, all my brothers and sisters. Then, for there was nothing else to do, I was in the hands of my hosts, I took off my damp clothes, got under the bedcovers and slept.

  When I woke it seemed to be some hours before dawn. Naomi was shaking my shoulder. In her other hand she held a torch. ‘We must be off,’ she said. ‘There’s an escort downstairs. They’ve put food for you in the chamber beyond. And clothing.’

  ‘It’s dark,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. They woke us up. The queen’s waiting for you.’

  She threw a cloak over me and I went shivering into the other room, where the queen, an attendant with a torch on either side of her, told me, ‘King Suppiluliumas has asked to see you in Hattusas today, if possible. We would have wished to entertain you longer, but this is the Great King’s command.’

  ‘I am grateful for this attention,’ I said, and I was. The fact of my arrival as a suppliant from Troy seemed to have made me, and my mission, important. We had been at war for six months with the city under siege. We had sent messages appealing for aid to the king which had been refused. My arrival in person altered nothing, I sometimes thought, but I did not realise that the great world does not work like that – a message is just a message, the arrival of an individual adds effect. We had crept from Brusa like fugitives, travelled here in some hardship. I had not realised that the very fact of this journey, undertaken with such difficulty, and some risk, by Priam’s daughter, somehow made the matter in hand more significant.

  Before long I was in a chariot and Nisintas and Naomi in a horse-drawn waggon with soldiers. There were horsemen bearing torches ahead of and behind us. The city gates were opened and we set off through the darkness.

  We travelled slowly at first, because of the dark, but when dawn came we were heading up through mountains at a steady pace. The sun rose ahead, over high, forested hills.

  We stopped at midday. Naomi produced food, and we ate apart from the soldiers. Nisintas approached just before we set off again, head down, looking fearful.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  He seemed unable to speak. Naomi became formal. ‘He requests, humbly, to know whether he understood you to say, and your good mother the queen, that it was your intention to free him at Hattusas. He says he is sorry if he was mistaken.’

  ‘Certainly. He has been faithful to his trust,’ I responded.

  Nisintas stared me full in the face. He began to smile.

  ‘He thought you were going to sell him everywhere we stopped along the road,’ Naomi told me. ‘That’s all he’s been used to in the past. Then he realised he’d revealed he was a smith, and thought if you didn’t sell him on the way, you’d make him come back to Troy to work in the smithy.’

  I had certainly entertained the idea, but felt it would bring bad luck to break the promise to free him, which had been given in solemn circumstances, at the outset of an important journey, in the presence of the oracle. I said, ‘If he wants to come back as a free man, he’s welcome to do so. We have need of him.’

  ‘He wants to see his old lover, the farmer’s daughter,’ she explained. ‘If she’s married with many children, he’ll return to Troy.’ They had worked the whole thing out between them.

  Nisintas was listening. His smile faded. He probably thought I would change my mind about freeing him at the last moment. So then and there, before we set off on the last leg of the journey to Hattusas, I made a formal statement so that the soldiers could hear, declaring him a free man. I don’t suppose it made any sense to the soldiers. I had to make up some words to give the situation as much dignity as possible. Slaves are seldom freed unless they are prosperous captives ransomed by their families. If they are freed it is because the owner says they are free, and the whole community behaves accordingly. Here, far from home, I had to invent a ceremony.

  And so, late that night, we set off again, travelling without stopping and before dawn next day reached our destination.

  There is no sight in the world I have seen like the vision of Hattusas, massive on the skyline as you approach it. They tell me there are greater cities, more charming and beautiful, set in more hospitable landscapes, but I cannot believe that, in its sombre way, anything could be more impressive than the appearance of that place in all its might. It covers four hundred acres of high mountain, a vast area overlooking long, fertile, upland plains. The huge palace is on even higher ground and the sea is almost two hundred miles away. I thought of this distant sea as we went towards the city. For those who have lived with the sea always beside them, inland life seems strange and unnatural.

  Before we reached the massive ramparts, I looked back only to see Nisintas, who had up to now been slumped in the waggon showing no outward sign of having been recently freed, suddenly jump over the side of the vehicle and run like a hare down a slope. It was hard to believe such a big, heavy man could travel so fast. There was a cry from the soldiers in the waggon but I signalled to them not to stop him.

  Then we were rolling through the straight, gravelled streets of Hattusas, a trumpeter on a horse blowing a call to clear the way, the citizens staring. And what citizens! There were curly-haired Assyrians in long robes, the pigtailed Hittite men in their short girdles and cloaks, round-faced men with narrow eyes, black hair in fringes and wearing furs. And soldiers everywhere!

  Though the traffic had to give way to us, it was a slow business: ox-carts had to pull to the side of a road jammed with waggons, long strings of horses and carts piled high with goods and children. We got mixed up in a whole caravan of horses, mules, armed men, merchants, a string of slaves. Most of this traffic was heading east to the Taurus mountains to get back to Assyria, Babylonia, Phoenicia, before the snows. In Gordion I had wished myself in Troy. But I was young, part of me was loyal, to family and country. The rest wanted what youth wants – love, pleasure, change. I suddenly saw how easy it would be, after my meeting with Suppiluliumas, to go east with them before winter – and find Arvad. I need not return to my beleaguered city.

  And then, we were at the palace of the Great King.

  Twenty-Three

  Thessaly

  I woke before dawn the morning after Helen’s arrival. The light woke me, that glow which shines through the air as snow drifts down and is thrown up from where it lies. I watched the soothing fall from my bed. Drowsily, I thought Helen could not leave now. She would stay in the farmhouse until it melted. I could not get rid of her. I could order her out, of course, but it would be a harsh host who ordered a guest out into a snow-storm. At least the delay would mean I could try to find out if she intended to betray me to her son-in-law.

  I got up before the servants woke, lit the fire in the big room, then pulled on a sheepskin coat, pushed my feet into the leather slippers worn in Thessaly in winter, and went out to feed and water the horses. As I did so, Helen’s stable-servant woke. I left the rest of the job to him and stood in the courtyard, snow blowing round about me. The stone bench at which I had s
et out to write my tale was coated lightly with snow. For a time I had been able to write in tranquillity, but that time was now over. I had begun to record my message to contradict the Greek version of my own and my family’s history. I had written in order to remember, and in remembering, perhaps to find some kind of reconciliation. All that had ended with Helen’s arrival. I did not know when, or if, I would ever conclude my tale.

  Perhaps, as Naomi suspected, the very act of making those black sparrow’s footsteps on my thick, brown papyrus had called up the Spartan queen. More likely, I thought, breathing the sharp, clear air, as the snow blew around me, the time for peace was over. I had a sense of urgency, I felt events pressing about me. A new cycle was beginning. Helen’s arrival had not caused it. It was a symptom, a signal like the first arrow in a battle, which will be followed by a hail of others. The way in which matters reveal themselves to such as me, blessed and cursed with foresight, is a mystery. All I recognise is that moment when change is imminent. I knew the little world in which I had sheltered for twenty years was about to break apart. I stood in the falling snow, as if entranced, and bade farewell to the old Cassandra, farmer’s wife, mother of children, woman in hiding.

  Yet the day-to-day life went on. Up came the farmyard cock with his three wives, all old friends reared on the family hearth, all hoping for a handful or two of corn. A man would have to be sent to the hillside to find a ewe for slaughter and I would have to decide, if the weather continued to be severe, if the flock should be rounded up and brought down to walled fields nearer the farmhouse. But in my mind I heard the warning horns blowing from ship to ship in fog as a raiding fleet came towards our coast, heard the crew calling to each other across the water, the crunch as the ships beached. For this was what would happen. It would not be too long.

  Inside the house Naomi was stirring oatmeal over the fire. Cakes of lamb mixed with onions smoked on a griddle. ‘You’ll want the men to bring the sheep off the hills,’ she said.