A Mist of Prophecies rsr-9

by Steven Saylor

  The three of them gathered around the prostrate form of the woman called Cassandra. They put their heads together and conferred in low voices. Cassandra stirred and rose to her knees, using her arms to steady herself. She looked dazed. She seemed hardly to notice the Vestals as the three of them helped her to her feet. I could see that Fabia was speaking to her, apparently asking her questions, but Cassandra made no reply. She blinked like a woman waking from a deep slumber and seemed finally to register the presence of the three women surrounding her. She straightened her tunica and her disarrayed hair with awkward, halting movements.

  Taking her by the elbows and gently guiding her, talking to her in low voices, the three Vestals led her up the steps and into the Temple of Vesta.

  "Well!" said Canininus. "What do you make of that?"

  "Perhaps the old virgin wants to ask the young madwoman what it's like to take a man," said Volcatius, leering. "I'll bet that one's had more than her share of men between her legs!"

  "Who knows what women talk about when there aren't any men around?" said Manlius.

  "Who cares?" said Canininus. "Now that Caesar's about to give Pompey a good thrashing…"

  And with that, the conversation turned away from the madwoman, for now, at last, there was the fresh news of Caesar's crossing to give us men something to talk about.

  Later that day, at the evening meal, I happened to mention the incident of the madwoman. The family was gathered in the dining room. Shutters were drawn to keep out the cold air from the garden at the center of the house, and a brazier had been lit to heat the room. Bethesda and I shared a couch. Davus and Diana shared the one to our left. Hieronymus reclined alone on the couch to our right.

  "Yes, yes, the woman called Cassandra," said Bethesda, putting down her bowl of chick pea soup and nodding. This was before her malady set in, when her appetite was still strong. The soup smelled strongly of black pepper. "I've seen her down in the marketplace."

  "Have you? How long has she been about?"

  Bethesda shrugged. "Not long. Perhaps a month."

  "Have you seen her experience one of these fits?"

  "Oh, yes. A bit unnerving the first time you see it. After it passes, she doesn't seem to know what's happened. She gradually comes to her senses and carries on with whatever she was doing before. Begging for alms, usually."

  "No one helps her?"

  "What's to be done? Some people are frightened by her and move away. Others want to hear what she says and move closer. They say she utters prophecies when she's like that, but I can't make sense of the noises she makes."

  "Why didn't you ever mention her to me?"

  "What possible interest could you have in such a wretched woman, Husband?" asked Bethesda, lifting her bowl of soup to take another sip.

  "But where does she come from? Has she no family? How long has she been experiencing these spells?"

  "If you were to ask after every odd character who wanders about the markets nowadays begging for scraps, you should find yourself very busy indeed, Husband. These are hard times. Maimed soldiers, widows, farmers, and shopkeepers who've lost everything to greedy creditors-there's no end to the beggars and vagrants. Cassandra's just one more."

  "Mother's right," said Diana. "Sometimes you see whole families wandering about with no place to go, especially down by the river. You feel sorry for them, of course, but what can anyone do? And some of them are dangerous. They look dangerous, anyway. That's why I always take Davus along when we go to the markets."

  "Victims of the war," I said, shaking my head. "It was the same when I was your age, Diana, during the first civil war. Refugees from the countryside, runaway slaves, orphans running wild in the streets. Of course, things got even worse after the war." I was remembering Sulla's bloody dictatorship and the heads of his enemies mounted on spikes all over the Forum. "Who named this woman Cassandra, anyway?" I asked, wanting to change the subject.

  "Some wag in the market, I imagine," said Bethesda.

  "People give nick names to the more colorful characters," noted Davus. "There's one they call Cerberus because he barks like a dog; a fellow they call Cyclops because he's got only one eye; and a woman they called the Gorgon because she's so ugly."

  "She's not that ugly," objected Diana.

  "Oh, yes she is," insisted Davus. "She's as ugly as Cassandra is beautiful."

  "And there are even those," said Diana, raising an eyebrow but snuggling closer to him, "who call a certain fellow 'mighty Hercules' behind his back."

  "No!" said Davus.

  "Oh, yes, Husband. I've heard them: admiring women; envious men." She smiled and reached up to squeeze one of his bulging biceps. Davus blushed and assumed a particularly stupid expression.

  I cleared my throat. "The original Cassandra was a Trojan princess, as I recall."

  "Indeed she was," said Hieronymus, ready to assert his authority on the subject. As a boy he had received a fine Greek education at one of the renowned academies for which Massilia was famous. He could recite long passages from the Iliad and knew many of the Greek tragedies by heart.

  "Cassandra was the fairest daughter of King Priam and Queen He cuba," he said, "and she was the sister of Paris, the prince who started all the trouble by stealing Helen and carrying her back to Troy. Cassandra could foretell the future. That was her terrible curse."

  "But why call it a curse?" asked Diana. "I should think that knowing the future would be rather useful. I could tell whether or not I'd be able to find anything decent to buy at the markets, instead of trekking down there only to come back empty-handed."

  "Ah, but you see, there's the rub," said Hieronymus. "Knowing the future doesn't mean that you can alter it. Suppose in the morning you had a vision of yourself down at the markets later that afternoon finding not a thing to buy. You'd still be destined to make that trip down to the market, only now you'd know ahead of time that you were doomed to accomplish nothing."

  "And that would be doubly frustrating," acknowledged Diana.

  Hieronymus nodded. "Foreknowledge is a curse. Imagine knowing the circumstances of your own death, as Cassandra did, and being able to do nothing about it."

  Davus frowned. "Imagine knowing ahead of time your greatest joys as well. Wouldn't that spoil them? Everyone loves a good surprise, even small surprises. When someone tells you a story, you don't want to guess the ending beforehand. You want to be surprised." Every now and then Davus said something to make me seriously doubt that he was as simple as he looked. "But how did the Trojan Cassandra come to have this gift, or curse?" he said. "Was she born with it?"

  "No, but she had it from a very early age," said Hieronymus. "When she was only a small child, her parents left her alone in the sanctuary of Apollo at a place called Thymbra, near Troy. When Priam and He cuba returned, they found Cassandra entwined by two serpents flicking their tongues in the child's ears. Afterward, Cassandra was able to understand the divine sounds of nature, especially the voices of birds, which told her of the future. But the child kept this gift to herself, not trusting it and uncertain of how to use it. When she grew older, she returned on her own to Thymbra and spent a night alone in the sanctuary, hoping for guidance from Apollo.

  "The god appeared to her in human form. Cassandra was beautiful. Apollo wanted her. He made a deal with her: in return for his instruction, Cassandra would allow him to make love to her, and she would bear him a child. Cassandra agreed. Apollo was as good as his word. That night he initiated her into the arts of prophecy. But afterward, when he moved to touch her, she resisted. When he embraced her, she struggled and fought against him. Who knows why? Perhaps he overawed her. Perhaps she feared the agony of giving birth to a demigod. Apollo was insulted. He grew furious. Cassandra was afraid he would strip her of the gift of prophecy, but he did something far worse: he ordained that no one should ever believe her prophecies.

  "Poor Cassandra! As one calamity after another befell Troy, she saw them all coming and tried to warn her loved ones, but
no one would listen to her. King Priam thought she was mad and locked her away. Perhaps in the end she truly was mad, tormented to distraction by the curse Apollo had put upon her.

  "Of course, everyone knows about the end of Troy-by the stratagem of hiding in a giant horse the Greeks gained access to the city and then torched it, killing the men and taking the women into slavery. During the sack of the city, Cassandra fled to the sanctuary of Athena and embraced the statue of the goddess as a suppliant. Little good that did her; Athena had no sympathy for any Trojan. Ajax broke into the temple and dragged Cassandra from the statue, tearing her fingers from the cold marble. He raped her there in the sanctuary.

  "But it was Agamemnon, asserting his privilege as leader of the Greeks, who claimed Cassandra as his booty. Mad or not, she was the most beautiful of Priam's daughters, and Agamemnon wanted her. He had the audacity to bring her home with him and flaunt her in the face of his wife, Clytaemnestra, who was outraged. While Agamemnon and Cassandra slept, Clytaemnestra stabbed them both.

  "Cassandra foresaw her own death, of course, but she was powerless to do anything about it. Or perhaps, by that point in her miserable life, she welcomed her end and did nothing to stop Clytaemnestra. Ultimately, it was the god she blamed for her woes. In his play about Agamemnon, Aeschylus gives us Cassandra's lament: 'Apollo, Apollo, Lord of the ways, my ruin.' "

  Poor Cassandra, I thought, first punished for preserving her chastity from a god, then made the concubine of the man who killed her family. Was the Cassandra I had seen that day yet another woman victimized by men's war and gods' cruelty? What misfortune had driven her mad? Or was she not mad at all, but cursed, like the original Cassandra, and truly able to perceive the future?

  If I were to ask her, what could she tell me about my fate and the fates of those I loved? And if I were to hear her answers, would I regret having asked?

  IV

  The day after Cassandra's funeral, I spent the morning alone in the garden. The day was hot and the sky cloudless. I sat on a folding chair, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and watching my shadow recede until the sun was directly overhead.

  Bethesda felt unwell and was spending the morning in bed. Every now and again I heard the sound of her gentle snoring from the unshuttered bedroom window that opened onto the garden. Diana and Davus had gone out to do the day's marketing. They had given up on finding radishes and were in search of fennel, which Bethesda was now certain would cure her. Hieronymus had gone down to the Tiber to fish, taking Mopsus and Androcles with him. No one had asked if I wanted to go along with them; they all sensed that I wished to be left alone.

  At length I heard Diana's voice. She and Davus were back. I saw her hurry along the portico to the back of the house and step into the bedroom to look in on her mother. A little later she came to the garden and sat beside me.

  "Mother's asleep. We should keep our voices low. I couldn't find any fennel, but can you believe it-there were radishes everywhere! So many they were practically giving them away. By Juno, it's hot out here! Papa, you shouldn't be sitting in the sunlight."

  "Why not? I'm wearing a hat."

  "Has it kept that brain of yours from overheating?"

  "What do you mean by that?"

  She paused and assumed an expression she had inherited from her mother, a look at once pitying and presumptuous. She might as well have said aloud: I know exactly how your sluggish, tortuous thought processes play out, dear Papa. I'm well ahead of you, but I'm resolved to be patient. I shall wait for you to catch up to your own inevitable decision.

  Instead, she said, "You've been thinking about her all morning, haven't you?"

  I sighed and readjusted my bottom on the folding chair, which was suddenly uncomfortable. "Your mother isn't well. Of course she's in my thoughts-"

  "Don't be coy, Papa." My daughter's voice assumed a stern edge. "You know what I meant. You've been thinking about her. About that woman, Cassandra."

  I took a deep breath. I stared at a sunflower across the way. "Perhaps."

  "You're brooding."

  "Yes."

  "You must stop it. We need you, Papa. It's getting harder every day just to get by, and Mother's ill, and Davus does all he can to help, but still, sometimes I don't know what we're going to do…" Her voice became grave, but there was no self-pity in it. Always hardheaded, always practical and forward thinking and resourceful, never despairing, that was Diana. She was truly our child, the inheritor of what was best in both Bethesda and myself.

  "What are you saying to me, Daughter?"

  "I'm saying that you must leave her behind. She's dead now. You must stop thinking about her. It's your family who need you now." Her tone was not reproachful, merely matter-of-fact. How much, exactly, did she know about Cassandra and me? What did she know for a fact, and how much had she guessed, rightly or wrongly?

  "Leave her behind, you say. Supposing that you're right, that I'm sitting here brooding about… that woman… how do you suggest I stop brooding, Daughter?"

  "You know the answer to that, Papa! There's only one way. You must find out who killed her."

  I gazed long and hard at the sunflower. "What good will that do?"

  "Oh, Papa, you sound so hopeless. I hate to see you like this. It's bad enough that Mother's ill, but for you to be sick as well-sick at heart, I mean-and you've been this way ever since you came back from Massilia. We all know why. It's because of what happened between you and-"

  I raised my hand to silence her. As a Roman paterfamilias, with the legal power of life and death over every member of my household, I was usually quite lax, allowing them all to speak their minds and do as they wished. But on this one subject, my break with Meto, I would allow no discourse.

  "Very well, Papa, I won't speak of that. Still, I hate to see you this way. You're like a man who thinks the gods have turned against him."

  And haven't they? I wanted to say, but such an expression of self-pity would have contrasted too glaringly with my daughter's stoicism, and not to my credit. Besides, I had no reason to believe the gods had singled me out to vent their displeasure. It seemed to me lately that the gods had turned against all man kind. Or perhaps they had simply turned their backs on us, allowing the most ruthless among us, like Caesar and Pompey, to wreak unchecked havoc on the rest.

  "Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of men-and women-will die before this war is over, Diana. Not one of those restless lemures of the dead is likely to find anything resembling justice in this world or the next. If Cassandra was murdered-"

  "You know she was, Papa. She was poisoned. She told you so."

  "If she was murdered, what good will it do to find out who killed her? No Roman court-presuming the courts ever return to normal-would be interested in prosecuting such a crime, perpetrated on a woman nobody knew or cared about."

  "You cared enough to give her a decent funeral."

  "That's beside the point."

  "And some of the most powerful women in Rome cared enough to come to her funeral. You saw them, skulking on the periphery, staying well away from the pyre as if the flames might scorch them-or show the guilt on their faces. It was one of them who killed her, wasn't it?"

  "It might have been." Before her death, Cassandra had been courted by the highest circles of Roman society, summoned to the houses of the rich and powerful who had learned about her gift. Had she known the danger she might face by consorting with such women? What uncovered secrets from the past-or from the future-might have led one of those women to silence Cassandra forever?

  "Shall I do it for you, Papa?"

  "Do what?"

  "Shall I do it in your stead-uncover the truth about her death?"

  "What a ridiculous idea!"

  "It's not so ridiculous. I know how you work. I've watched you since I was a child. I've listened to all your stories about snooping for Cicero, and uncovering chariot races that were fixed, and going off to Spain or Syracuse to look for a murderer at some rich man's behest. Do you think I'd
be incapable of doing the same thing myself?"

  "You make it sound like baking a batch of flat bread, Diana. Mix this list of ingredients, bake for a certain length of time-"

  "Baking is harder than you make it sound, Papa. It takes skill and experience."

  "Exactly. And you have neither when it comes to-well, to the sort of work you're talking about."

  "It's because I'm a woman, isn't it? You don't think I could do it because I'm a woman. Do you really think I'm not as clever as a man?"

  "Cleverness has nothing to do with it. There are places a woman can't go. There are questions a woman can't ask. And don't forget the danger, Diana."

  "But I'd have Davus for all that! He's big and strong. He can go anywhere. He could twist arms or break down doors-"

  "Diana, don't be absurd!" I took off my hat and fanned myself with it, squinting at the bright sunlight. "You've done some thinking about this, haven't you?"

  "Perhaps."

  "Well, stop any such thoughts at once, and abandon any ambitions you may have in such a direction-'Diana the Finder,' indeed!"

  "No-Diana and Davus the Finders, plural."

  "Double absurdity! I absolutely forbid it. You'll follow the example of your mother. She began with every disadvantage, yet look at her now-she's made herself into the very model of a Roman matron: modest, respectable, responsible, running a household, raising a family-"

  "Is that how you'd describe those model Roman matrons who showed up at Cassandra's funeral?"

  I thought of some of those women and the scandals that attended them, and I had to cede the point to Diana. In such times, did any real standard of Roman womanhood exist any longer? It was the same for men and women alike-virtues had turned to vices and vices to virtues.

  I put on my hat and stood, listening to my knees crack as they straightened. "If your intention was to incite me to action, Diana, then you've succeeded. Fetch Davus for me, would you? I shall take him along with me-in case I have to break down some doors or twist some arms. And you, meanwhile, will stay home and tend to your ailing mother. I expect to smell radish soup bubbling on the hearth when I come home!"