A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

  The room was dark, with small high windows, and it reminded her of the temple. Helenus came to visit her sometimes, and her grief at what he would do was tempered by the knowledge that he would survive the war, albeit held in captivity by the Greeks. But she also knew that her mother would die believing all her sons had been killed because she could not believe Cassandra. And how was it possible that her beloved twin would betray Troy to the hated Odysseus? That he would take the gift of prophecy which he had acquired – to a lesser extent than his sister, but with the advantage of being heard – and use it to betray their city? And all because he was not given the hand of Helen after Paris had died, though he must surely have known that Helen of Troy would become Helen of Sparta once more. Cassandra could almost smell the rocky terrain of the Peloponnese on her: Helen would never remain in Troy once the war was over.

  Cassandra did not have to try to forgive her brother, because she had already seen the resentment twist him out of shape, long before it happened. He could no more help the jealousy than a bird could help its wings. She maintained her brother’s innocence, even as she foresaw his guilt. She held to it still, even on the day that Troy fell, and she found herself clinging to the feet of Athene’s statue as a Greek warrior wrenched her away from her sanctuary by her hair, before raping her on the floor of the temple.

  A year after Apollo had cursed her, she had grown gaunt from the sickness which so frequently accompanied her visions. She was never sure if the nausea was an element of the vision itself, or a consequence of the horrific things she saw. She found it hard to eat, harder not to vomit when the power of prophecy was at its strongest. But gradually, she learned that she could control some of the effects of the visions, if she could only focus her mind on the part of someone’s future that preceded or came after the worst thing that would happen to them (which was what she saw first, and with most clarity).

  And sometimes, of course, the visions were a comfort. So even as Troy fell, even as she fled to the temple of Athene, she knew her cries for sanctuary would be ignored and she was not shocked. Even as the Greek warrior Ajax tore out her hair to drag her away from the goddess’s statue, even as he chipped one stone foot as he wrenched at her desperate fingers, even as he drove himself into her, even as she cried out in blood and pain, she knew her rape would be avenged. She saw the hated Odysseus appeal to the Greeks for Ajax to be punished for violating the temple and image of Athene, and she saw the Greeks ignore him. But she also knew that Athene would have her revenge: the goddess would forgive no Greek for this outrage, save Odysseus. It did not bring back Cassandra’s ripped-out hair or her ripped-out virginity, but it was a solace, nonetheless.

  And after living for so long with the terrible foreknowledge of the sack of Troy, with the slaughter of brothers, of father, of sister and nephew, she was perhaps as relieved as the Greeks to see it fall. The anticipation of disaster was more agonizing than the disaster itself and at least as the fires raged, the dread was over. Partially over.

  When the screams of Andromache, as her son was taken from her, pierced Cassandra’s perforated heart, she tried to focus her mind on her sister-in-law in one year, in two years, in five years, in ten. But the technique which had worked in the past was not working now. She could see nothing but devastation wherever she looked: the multiple griefs of Andromache and Hecabe were too much for her to overcome. As always, when faced with an assault on her senses, her mind returned to its greatest horror. She tried to breathe slowly, knowing that it sometimes quelled the panic. But she could not. For her, there would be nothing after her worst thing. The worst thing that was coming for her would cost her her life and the lives of—

  She lost her capacity to breathe for a moment, and passed into unconsciousness.

  *

  Sleep gave Cassandra no respite. The visions came to her as dreams, just as vividly as they did when she was awake. She had always known that it would be Agamemnon who claimed her, though she had never known why – she could see the future only of those to whom she was in physical proximity, so only her own role had been clear to her until the Argive soldiers dragged her from her rock and took her to their king.

  Cassandra was the last of the house of Priam to leave the Troad peninsula. Neither Hecabe nor Andromache remained to bid her farewell. Hecabe had already sailed with Odysseus, to be revenged upon Polymestor. And Andromache had been taken by Neoptolemus. But she could not distract herself with thoughts of Andromache, however much she tried. She would come back to her sister-in-law during the voyage to Greece. She would be unable to do anything else.

  When she first saw Agamemnon, she felt a shock of recognition. This pudgy, greying man with thick oil in his fading hair and a roll of fat clearly visible at his waist had haunted her. He was identical to her vision, right down to the ugly twist of his lip when he looked upon her and found her wanting.

  ‘This is a princess of Troy?’ he asked his men. ‘She’s in rags.’

  ‘They were all in rags, king,’ said one of his men. The tone of weary patience was so familiar to Cassandra that she almost felt it was one of her brothers speaking. She had to remind herself the man was a stranger, whose voice she had heard a thousand times. ‘This is the priestess, daughter of Priam and Hecabe.’

  Agamemnon nodded, his eyes now focused on her. ‘She has a sort of beauty perhaps,’ he said. ‘More so than the one who went with Neoptolemus?’

  The weary Argive did not allow his face to betray his irritation. ‘I believe so, king, yes. And the woman who went with Neoptolemus was only the daughter-in-law of Priam, remember. She was not even Trojan by birth.’

  ‘She was Hector’s widow, wasn’t she?’ Agamemnon said. Neither Cassandra nor the tired Argive was fooled by his feigned ignorance.

  ‘She was, king, but she was no Trojan. This one,’ he jabbed his finger into Cassandra’s back, ‘was born into the royal household. And she was the priestess of Troy. They say she was blessed by Apollo himself.’

  Agamemnon rolled his eyes, which Cassandra had never understood before. Now – standing in front of him – she could see that he had not long ago been deprived of another girl, the daughter of a priest of Apollo. That the priest and the god himself had intervened for her return. She saw the girl reflected somewhere in his eyes, hiding behind a tent, dropping leaves into his drinks. So Agamemnon had crossed Apollo too. She wondered why the Archer let them sail back to Greece instead of sharing Athene’s rage and capsizing their ship. But wishing to drown was no use to Cassandra. She already knew she would reach Argive soil and she knew what awaited her there.

  37

  Gaia

  Gaia – the Great Mother, born from Chaos, the first of the gods – stretched her aching limbs and the earth moved. The mountains shook, but so faintly that the only evidence was the quivering of leaves on branches. She heard the distant sound of men fighting men, and she knew a larger conflict was coming. Zeus had heard her pleas, had consulted with her daughter, Themis, and the decision was made. There would be an almighty war, the like of which men had never seen.

  Gaia had seen a more ruinous war, but long ago. She had been witness to the Titanomachy, when the Titans waged war on the Olympian gods, and the destruction had been impossible, endless, deafening. She had never believed, as the Titans were locked away from the light, behind bronze doors which could never be broken, that she would yearn for another war. But now she yearned.

  Mankind was just so impossibly heavy. There were so many of them and they showed no sign of halting their endless reproduction. Stop, she wanted to cry out, please stop. You cannot all fit on the space between the oceans, you cannot grow enough food on the land beneath the mountains. You cannot graze enough livestock on the grasses around your cities, you cannot build enough homes on the peaks of your hills. You must stop, so that I can rest beneath your ever-increasing weight. She wept fat tears as she heard the cries of newborn children. No more, she said to herself. No more.

  They made offerings to her, sacr
ifices of meat and grain and wine. But they were still too many and she ached from carrying them. She sent her message to Zeus, son of Cronos, son of Ouranos, husband of Gaia. Zeus would not let her pain go unanswered. She had supported him too well in the past. And he knew the truth of her complaint. He knew the increasing population could not be sustained. She would not tell him how to diminish their numbers, she would leave that to him. He would speak to Themis, and the two of them would come up with a plan. The divine order of things would be restored once the mortal problem had been corrected. Gaia thought back to the last time mankind had become too heavy, and remembered that Zeus had not left her to suffer for long. The Theban Wars, when seven warriors had marched against the city of Thebes, and a civil war had spilled over into the rest of Greece, had served his purpose then. But this time the problem had grown weightier. A larger war was needed.

  She felt sorrow course through her: her purpose was to nurture and provide for men. But they kept taking more from her than she had to give. She looked out across the expanse and saw trees denuded of their fruits, fields ploughed until they could give up no more crops. Why could men not just be less greedy, she wondered. Her sorrow morphed into irritation. And why could they not heed the lessons given to them by Zeus? They spent enough time in his temples, after all. Why did they not look at the wars which had ravaged Thebes, and understand that these were necessary because they would not stop consuming everything? That if they carried on as they were, the seas would be empty of fish and the land would be empty of grain?

  When there were fewer men, fewer women, fewer children, she would grieve for those who had gone, but she would know it was the only answer. She was so tired, she could feel herself sinking beneath them. Forgive me, she murmured into the breeze. Forgive me, but I cannot hold you any longer.

  38

  Penelope

  Odysseus,

  I honestly don’t know where to begin. But since you are surely dead by now, I don’t suppose it can matter very much. I might as well be howling these words into an abyss as trying to send them to you. Perhaps that is what I am doing. In which case, there must be an echo, because I would swear an oath that I can hear the words howling back at me sometimes.

  This just gets better and better. Ten years waging war against one city with all the forces Greece could muster alongside you. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And that is the most defensible part of your absence. Ten years of war, followed by three solid years wandering about the high seas, failing to come home with one excuse after another. You met a monster. You met a witch. Cannibals broke your ships. A whirlpool ate your friends. Telemachus himself would never have come up with such excuses and he was a boy. Not any more, of course. Now he is twenty. A grown man, in need of his own wife and child. In need of his own father, too, of course. But that rarely seems to occur to you.

  And now seven more years – seven! Odysseus, can you even remember what that means? Twenty-eight more seasons, seven more harvests, boys grown to men, mothers dead, fathers ailing – with no word from you. But rest assured (and I am sure you are having a very long rest), the bard has you covered. You are held captive, so he sings, on the island of Ogygia. Captive, I asked him, the first time he sang this part of your story. Who holds him captive? What cruel jailer locks my husband away from the light and deprives him of a free man’s liberty? What vicious tyrant, with what forces at his command, could imprison my poor Odysseus?

  To be fair to him, he did at least have the decency to look ashamed. It was no tyrant, he said. No man held you (this is starting to sound like one of your alibis, Odysseus: who has blinded the Cyclops? No one. Who holds you captive? No one). Eventually, under sustained questioning, he admitted that it is a woman who has taken you prisoner. A horrible old crone, I asked? Who lives in a tumbledown old house in the woods and has adopted you as her son to chop firewood and hunt wild boar on which she can feast? No, came his shamefaced reply. A nymph. Of course it is.

  Calypso is her name, so I am told. No wonder he was trying to cover that up. She has – if the bard can be trusted on this – a delightful singing voice. Well, you always did like a tune, didn’t you? Perhaps she reminds you of those bird-women you were so desperate to hear.

  Her island is in the middle of nowhere, far from Ithaca and far from everywhere. She lives in a large cave, which sounds practically bestial to me, but apparently she has a hearth and burns cedar logs for the warmth and the homely scent. You used to have a home on Ithaca, of course, but perhaps our logs weren’t quite up to your current standards. Her cave is surrounded by thick woodlands, apparently, which sounded so much like a euphemism when the bard first sang it that I threatened to have him flogged. He assured me he was describing nothing more vulgar than poplar and cypress trees, home to owls and hawks and other birds. I can’t decide whether he is laughing at me or not. It all sounds positively idyllic – as jails go, I mean – with a vine full of ripe grapes growing around the mouth of the cave, and springs murmuring with fresh water bubbling up nearby. Meadows of parsley grow outside, dotted with violets, because I presume she likes the colour. Or perhaps she eats them. With your dalliances, Odysseus, it becomes increasingly hard to guess.

  And Calypso seems to have been the perfect hostess, so long as you overlook the part where you are – and it seems almost quaint that I still remember this – my husband, and not hers. The bard describes her excellence at weaving, at her golden loom, for example, which I’m sure you appreciated as much as anyone. You probably needed a new cloak after your shipwreck, I would imagine.

  I also have been weaving, in case you were interested. You’re probably wondering what else I have been doing with the last twenty years: I could have woven cloaks for the whole of Ithaca in this time. And perhaps I would have, if I were not engaged in weaving an endless shroud. No, don’t despair: your father has not yet journeyed to meet your mother in the Underworld. Laertes lives, though he is old, and frail, and bent almost double from the grief of waiting for his son to return.

  But you have been gone so long, Odysseus, that Ithaca no longer regards you as its king. Some of the old families do, of course. They remain loyal to you, as have I. But there are many more young men, vying to take your place. If you could see them, brawling with one another like stags. I hoped that Telemachus would be strong enough to see them off, but he is a quiet, cautious young man, prone to tears. He grew up without a father, of course, and it has left him uncertain of how he should be. For many years, I was strong enough to keep them at bay, calling on your reputation. The tales which came back to us from Troy were so impressive. You were a warrior king, no one would dare disobey your wife.

  But those stories have not been fresh for a long time now. When did we last hear news of you? Seven years ago, and you were facing an array of impossible, implausible obstacles, one after another. By the time the bards had done their work, none of us knew whether you lived or died. Seven years of silence means that most Ithacans are sure you have died. I find myself unable to accept that you are dead, but equally unable to believe that you are alive. Perhaps it is your shroud I’m weaving. The noblemen’s sons, who were too young to sail with you all those years ago, have grown up to be spoiled, entitled men. Each is convinced he should replace you. Each knows the best route to that goal is marriage to your widow. And so, Odysseus, I find myself with a houseful of young men who are eating and drinking everything we have in our stores.

  Remember the wine, and the grain, and the oil, which we kept in casks beneath the great hall? I used to hug myself – do you remember – when we went down the cool stone steps, out of the heat and light, to the storeroom? The first time it happened, you thought I was shivering from the cold. You loosened the pins of your cloak and swung it around my shoulders. The smell of you on that soft wool made me almost cry with delight (I was pregnant, of course. I am not usually such a sentimental fool). So I clothed myself in you and breathed deeply. But the next time, and the next, you noticed that I always wrapped my arms aroun
d myself in the storeroom, whether I was cold or not. You didn’t have to ask: you just knew that it came from an abiding sense of happiness. Of satisfaction that no matter what the winter brought, we were ready. We had so much, stored away from the mould and the mice, in our cool, dry storeroom.

  Well, those stores are almost gone now. These boorish, cavernous men have invaded my home and demolished everything they can find within. They sleep with my serving-women, so I no longer know who to trust. And if the thought of your wife in jeopardy does not stir you to action, they also plot to kill your son. He has gone travelling in search of news about his father: to Pylos, I think, and perhaps Sparta. So he is safe for now (as safe as a man who travels away from home can ever be. I am hoping you are an exceptional case). But eventually, he will return, and they will not leave him alone for long.

  Telemachus’ best hope is that I marry one of these young, handsome, greedy men, and thus reduce the threat he poses to them. Is that what you would want, Odysseus, if you were alive? I cannot pretend I haven’t considered it. They are so very, very young. And I am not. The thought of their hard, youthful flesh is a tempting one. It’s not as if you have been faithful, after all. Your infidelities are the subject of song all over Achaea and beyond. There are children learning to play the lyre who can sing of your other women. And nymphs. And goddesses.