As Diomed grew up, his resemblance to Agamemnon had become more and more marked. Slowly, from his childish face, the lineaments of the dead king emerged. He grew tall – taller than Iphitus or his brothers and sisters. I had known from his birth he might be in danger from the rulers of Mycenae. As this resemblance to his dead father grew it became more and more obvious he must leave Greece before he became a man. My husband of course knew Diomed was not his child. He must have been as convinced as a man can be that Agamemnon was Diomed’s father, but he said nothing of any of this. He was a kind man and part of his kindness lay in silence. Agamemnon was dead, but many had seen him, and all who had seen him would remember him. No ruler could risk Agamemnon’s old soldiers rallying to his son, however unlikely it was.
The only way to ensure Diomed’s safety was to send him away from Greece. So as he approached fourteen years old, I sent a secret message to Helenus, undisturbed lord over his own wild area, and despatched the boy to his uncle. This caused me great suffering. He had little experience of anything but life on his farm. Helenus had put him in the charge of an Egyptian captain, who had taken him to King Rameses in Egypt. Pharaoh (no friend of the Greeks) had kindly found him a position in his army. And there he had prospered. Perhaps he had inherited his father’s gift for war.
It had been wrong not to tell Diomed why he was being forced from his home. I believed it must have been Helenus and Andromache who had, gently, I am sure, told him of his origins. What he had thought on hearing the terrible story of his birth and parentage, I could not know. Yet he seemed to have sustained the shock and the toughening experience of Pharaoh’s court. He seemed still the same open, straightforward individual he had always been.
The horror now was that after all the efforts made to save him, by a terrible mischance, a matter of only a day, he had now encountered the woman who could do both of us more damage than anyone else in the world. She knew who I was, she had known the face of Agamemnon. She could betray both of us to the king, her son-in-law. He would not be happy that his father had another living son, the image of himself, a soldier (as he, Orestes, was not), another Agamemnon to follow the one still praised in ballads and songs, recalled sentimentally by his troops, a god among the Greeks.
Naomi – I could read her mind – thought a dagger in Helen’s ribs the best and only answer to our predicament. She was right, but I could not and would not take up the methods of that perverse and blood-spattered family – could not commit yet another murder which would, according to their own tradition, create another series of murders, lengthening that long chain of death and revenge inside the family. They had killed and killed – enemies, friends, each other – over generations. If I despatched Helen with a knife – and it would not have been hard – it would be clear proof that the family taint or curse, rather, had not disappeared. The slayings would continue. I had watched Diomed in childhood, dreading that some day bad blood would appear in him. It had not. So I thought, was I to do the deed which would stir it up?
Some other means to silence Helen had to be found. But I could not imagine what that might be.
It was an uneasy feast we had that day. We shared it with the soldiers who had accompanied Diomed. It was impossible to talk privately, but huge questions hung in the air. Helen’s gaze was almost continually on Diomed, as if she saw a wonder, like a fountain springing up suddenly in the middle of the room. Diomed was equally fascinated by her. And I thought of that rapid remark he had made when he first arrived, that he planned to take me to Egypt.
I had been so horrified by the prospect of his meeting Helen, I had not paid sufficient attention to what he had said, or how he had said it. Thinking now, I realised it had not sounded, simply, like a filial desire to have his mother under his care and protection. There had been too much urgency in his tone. Also, he had not raised the topic again, as he might have done, while we ate. It was as if because Helen was present, he was not prepared to say any more. She, however, spoke of her own departure – her waggons were loaded, she might have left hours ago if we had not taken fright at the arrival of unknown people and she hoped there would be no more snow. As she talked though, her eyes rarely left Diomed’s face.
Meanwhile Diomed spoke to her in the courteous manner of one meeting a previously unknown relative, but without making it too obvious to his men there was any relationship. That grim and shameful history would have done him no good in the eyes of his soldiers. Although he was apparently open and candid, I saw his attitude to this situation was extremely cautious.
The men, of course, were intensely interested when they found themselves feasting with the legendary Helen. She bore their scrutiny of her blemished beauty with calm. She must have been perpetually subjected to that look which always said, ‘One can see how lovely she must have been – once upon a time.’
I went out to fetch more bread – the soldiers were hungry. Naomi caught me by the arm. She said, ‘I’ll kill her. If I don’t, she’ll destroy us.’
‘No,’ I told her. ‘The killing’s stopped.’
‘You dream,’ she said. ‘This is one death, well deserved, to save our lives. This has nothing to do with the past.’ She seemed to cast her eyes sideways, as if the past, figures locked in combat, a burning city, lay there in the corner of the room. In a sense now, it did. She said, ‘That’s over. Come into the present.’
‘It’s not over. We see that now,’ I told her.
‘Never mind. Never mind,’ she replied urgently. ‘This is not a poem or a ballad. This is real life. She can return to her husband or to Orestes, to any one of a number of kings and leaders – she will tell them what she has seen. You – Diomed. From that moment on, our lives aren’t worth a pin. If she does that,’ Naomi continued, ‘we’ll become part of some hideous sequel to what went before. Do you want that?’
She touched me on the raw. ‘No killing,’ I said obstinately.
She gave me a furious, scornful look. ‘Then I’ll go to my man across the hills, now,’ she said. ‘And take my boy. I won’t have him die, for you. I may not return.’ And she was running for her child, asleep in her room, in an instant. I returned to the table.
‘My men can escort you some of the way,’ Diomed was suggesting politely to Helen.
What had Helen said while I was gone? ‘You can’t be leaving now? It’ll be dark soon,’ I said in alarm. I did not trust her. I felt safe while she was under my roof. Once she was gone, I would fear her.
But now she was determined to leave. ‘It may snow again, as you have said. We have just enough light to get us south to Pinios. There we will spend the night and make a good start in the morning.’
There was no stopping her. In the courtyard I pleaded, ‘Say nothing of all this, Helen. Let the past remain the past. No one plans any harm to anyone. You and I – we have seen enough ambition, killing, soreness of heart Let matters rest. I promise you we will do the same.’
She was getting into her litter, her men all round her. She smiled that lovely smile. ‘We have all suffered,’ she said. ‘The gods cannot require any more of us. I have been involved in enough destruction. Do you think I want more? I have never been a vicious woman, Cassandra, nor an ambitious one. My sister and I were two sides of that coin – she, all rage and desire, I only requiring love, and peace. You know that well, don’t you?’
I nodded. It was true, Helen had no lust for rule, power, cities or gold. She took the products gladly, but she never worked, schemed or fought for them, or asked others to do so. She spoke the truth. She only desired love, peace, comfort, ease of mind. Of course, we had all paid a high price for all these innocent desires of hers.
She put her hand in mine, the good one. ‘I wish you only well. You, too, need peace. You have it now, with the respect of your neighbours and your fine children. You can be assured of my silence. What good would it do me to harm you?’
Those great blue eyes fixed me. Her charm and sincerity flowed over me. I said, ‘Thank you, sister. I’m glad ou
r battles are over.’
Diomed and I saw her waggons and men depart. At the bend in the road, she turned to wave.
Inside the house, no longer playing the part of the slave, Naomi, her child held in one hand, a big bundle in the other, rounded on us. ‘You should have killed her,’ she cried. ‘Now what will she do? It isn’t as if you don’t know her of old.’
‘She’ll be silent,’ I told Naomi. ‘She said she wanted no more deaths. She even asked me what she would gain now by betrayal.’
Naomi turned on Diomed, and shouted at him, ‘Do you trust her?’ She showed no respect for this man, whom she had mopped, fed with a spoon, scolded and watched like a hawk as he grew, knowing his parentage and fearing some evil would come out in him.
We argued fiercely. It was not too late, Naomi said, for the Egyptian soldiers to go after Helen and kill her. Her attendants were callow men – Diomed’s men were veterans. Diomed was reasonable: there were reasons why that course was not only undesirable – repugnant to him, he said – but also unnecessary. I argued, too, for allowing Helen to live, but seeing Diomed after so many years made me remember his birth on the farm, assisted only by Iphitus’ mother and sister. ‘Look! My son’s son!’ the old lady had cried, holding up the yelling, bloody infant, her suspicions of the peculiar, alien bride subdued, though not for long. I remembered the joy of his birth, mercifully untainted by thought of his father. But now, the past crowded in on me; while under the hanging depicting goddesses and seasons, Diomed, Naomi and I were locked in argument, I was, in memory, returning to Mycenae, long ago.
Thirty-Eight
Mycenae
I stood surrounded by guards in the courtyard outside the great hall at Mycenae, high above the sea. Gazing in awe at the vast palace Agamemnon had had built for himself, I began to feel the force of the gown I was wearing, that red gown with the old thready embroidery of animals, snakes, birds, in green and blue, so old the colours had faded and the patterns were almost lost. Yet the garment had taken magic into its fabric, I knew. I also knew it had been torn from the oracle of the hill, that woman I had feared so much all my life, who had been struck down with her arms uplifted at the gates of Troy, delivering a fearful curse on her killers. The gown was imparting its magic to me. I am sure that some power far beyond Agamemnon had prompted him to select the robe and give it to me. We had not gone far along the road to Mycenae when I began to feel the atmosphere it carried. What prophecies and what sacrifices had not entered into its fibres, what secrets had it not heard? Every thread knew the bellowing of beasts for sacrifice, wild music, fire, all the practices of the goddess.
A chill came in from the sea. I had forgotten. The year was ending. At home we would have been harvesting, picking our fruit, pressing our wine. But I was in this faraway and barren land, the tip of the world, wearing the oracle’s gown, power mounting in me. We ascended the steep hill, passed through the mighty gates of the fortress and were there at the palace of Mycenae. I stood alone, guarded in the courtyard.
I watched the queen, Clytemnestra, leading her daughter by the hand, come out to greet her lord. He was tall, dusty, in battered armour, scarred and washed only by the sea at Aulis. She was dressed in a gown blue as the sky and in her hair was a fillet of flowers. At the last moment, she dropped her daughter’s hand and ran towards her lord, like a girl, arms outstretched. Her daughter, Electra, stood for a moment, then ran after her. As Clytemnestra ran, face alight with joy, the blue gown fluttering round her shapely limbs, I saw deception. This was not a bride rushing to her husband, as she wanted him to think. She was a sheet of fire, driven by wind towards a hayfield; she was an arrow tipped with poison speeding towards a great lion; she was the dagger of gold coming down on the white oxen. She was the priestess, Agamemnon the sacrifice.
Clytemnestra embraced her warrior, speaking to him gently in a voice too low for anyone to hear. The girl, Electra, had halted in her run towards her father and stood between the group of Clytemnestra’s women and the reunited couple. The expression on her face chilled me. It was terrible to see behind the sweetness and passivity of that child-woman’s face such cunning and bad intention. The girl hated her mother, that was clear. Time froze. There were the couple embracing, the girl looking on, the women, soldiers, all watching the reunion of Agamemnon and his queen. It was as if that moment would last forever.
For me the scene was beginning to lose form and colour, dissolving into grey mist, streaked with red. I felt behind the palace walls a man watching. I felt his fear, his desire for murder. He was like a huge, grey toad, waiting. But then the mists cleared from my eyes. The trance into which I was sinking suspended itself for a little while.
There was a disturbance. A column of Greek soldiers, a line of chained captives, two chariots, then waggons, piled high, were coming through the gates. A contingent of Greeks must have landed at a port lower down the coast from Aulis and had evidently arrived at Mycenae from the other direction. In the long line of chained slaves between a tall boy and a collapsing woman I saw Naomi, carrying a baby. She saw me, but gave no sign. It seemed fate had brought us both to the centre of this wasps’ nest and she was showing every caution. Then she turned her head towards the gates. Clattering in came Prince Aeneas, son of my father’s oldest adviser, Aeneas the Trojan, still in his armour and driving a chariot, while the rest of his countrymen and women came in chains.
My astonishment was great. Naomi, having indicated Aeneas’ arrival, now cast a half-look of great significance. It told me Aeneas was a friend of the Greeks, must have been a friend even before the city fell. This explained the ease with which he had seized his child from his wife’s arms then managed to escape with him and his elderly father from a burning city filled with victorious Greeks, a city from which no other Trojan warrior had escaped alive. But I wondered what had he offered in exchange for safety for himself and his family? Years later, of course, Naomi told me she had recognised Aeneas as the visitor to Tenedos the night before the successful Greek assault on the city. That was when Aeneas had given away the only secret the Greeks could have wanted, the secret of the tunnel and the position of the tunnel’s mouth.
However, I was still barely on this side of consciousness. Aeneas in his chariot, the united couple on the flagstones before the palace, the trailing girl, Electra – all seemed to me like little wooden puppets, mounted stiffly on a little stage in front of crudely painted scenery. Even the relief of seeing Naomi alive and the shock of the terrible perfidy of Aeneas were soon lost to me. The last event I recall was witnessing Queen Clytemnestra taking her husband’s hand and starting to lead him with great dignity into the palace, smiling up at him as they went.
I screamed, heard my own scream, had a vision of the queen behind the thick walls of the palace gently bathing her husband in warm rose-petalled water, already prepared, and saw her gracefully hand him wine. Then, as he stepped from the water, erect, lusting for her after her ministrations, I saw her advance towards him, with a cloak of fine scarlet she had woven for him with her own hands, throw the cloak over him, covering his head, saw her raise her hand, with a hidden dagger in it, as he, at first laughing, then struggling, tried to push the enveloping cloak from his head and arms. I saw her plunge the knife into his heart. I watched her strike and strike again, saw Agamemnon wildly, then more weakly attempt to escape. I saw her lover, the grey toad, rush in, knife raised, to add his blows to hers. They stabbed him a hundred times, before he fell, and after, as he lay writhing and struggling inside his scarlet caul. They went on striking into him, on and on until they were at last satisfied he was dead.
I must have told all this, arms raised, as the captives screamed at my words and the soldiers stood appalled and astonished. Towards the end, Aeneas, they said later, jumped from his chariot, ran to me and struck me to the ground. Then he wheeled his chariot and was off, appearing to have other business in other places to conduct, as men like that always will.
When I next saw the sky, the air around me re
nt by cries and screams, I was lying on the paving stones before the palace. Turning my head, I dimly saw a tall, black-bearded man, many soldiers at his back, carrying the great body of Agamemnon from the palace. This he threw to the ground. I saw Agamemnon’s big hand, my father’s heavy gold ring on his finger, red with blood, only yards from me. Then I saw a man’s foot in a sandal, a braced, muscular leg beside me, heard the clash of swords. Agamemnon’s men were fighting the men of the palace, to avenge their leader and kill the murderess wife and her usurping lover. But I could not rise, through weakness. I would die here, I supposed – die trampled, probably – but I had long expected death at Mycenae and I felt nothing.
Then I was hoisted up, across an armoured back, by someone strong and skilful enough to get through fighting men without damage, and carried safely back through the battle taking place in front of the palace at Mycenae. I first found myself being heaved across the courtyard at a run. I saw hand-to-hand fighting, the corpse of Agamemnon, with his poor daughter crouched over it, as men fought round her. The terrified captives, still chained, were trying to scuttle off to shelter in a corner of a wall. I felt the plumes of a helmet in my face.
Aeneas grunted, ‘Be still, lady. Do nothing or you are a dead woman.’ He had left his chariot on the road to Mycenae and it was down the road to the chariot that he carried me. He dumped me on the floor, shouted to me to stay there, and be quiet, then whipped up his horses. We began to move at a fast, rocking pace. ‘Some will call me traitor,’ he shouted to himself more than me. ‘But I – I – shall live on with my son, to celebrate the name of Troy.’
From the floor of the chariot, I muttered weakly, ‘You disguise treachery with a pious statement.’ He heard me.
‘Troy would have fallen, then or later. The Greeks would never have given up their ambitions,’ he said. He was standing straight, muscles straining, whipping his horses like a madman. I had seen him like that in battle. Even in treachery, he looked the hero.
Cassandra Page 37
