Cassandra

by Hilary Bailey

  HILARY BAILEY

  Cassandra

  PRINCESS OF TROY

  For my son, Max, and The Eagles (1989)

  Contents

  Part One

  One: Thessaly

  Two: Troy

  Three: Thessaly

  Four: Troy

  Five: Between Troy and Mycenae

  Six: Thessaly

  Seven: Troy

  Eight: Troy

  Nine: Troy

  Ten: Troy

  Eleven: Thessaly

  Twelve: Troy

  Thirteen: Troy

  Fourteen: Thessaly

  Part Two

  Fifteen: Mycenae, Summer

  Sixteen: Mycenae

  Seventeen: Thessaly/Mycenae

  Eighteen: Thessaly

  Nineteen: Troy, Summer

  Twenty: Thessaly

  Twenty-One: Troy, Autumn

  Twenty-Two: The Journey to Hattusas

  Twenty-Three: Thessaly

  Twenty-Four: Mycenae

  Twenty-Five: Hattusas

  Twenty-Six: Thessaly

  Twenty-Seven: Troy

  Twenty-Eight: Troy and Thessaly

  Twenty-Nine: Troy

  Thirty: Troy

  Thirty-One: Troy

  Thirty-Two: Thessaly

  Thirty-Three: Troy

  Part Three

  Thirty-Four: Mycenae

  Thirty-Five: Thessaly

  Thirty-Six: Troy

  Thirty-Seven: Thessaly

  Thirty-Eight: Mycenae

  Thirty-Nine: Thessaly

  Forty: Returning to Troy

  Author’s Note

  A Note on the Author

  Part One

  One

  Thessaly

  I sit here at the stone table outside my house with my writing materials and the wind is already lightly rattling the leaves of the lemon tree beside me. Most of the herbs in the herb-bed I have been watering throughout the summer heat will not live much longer now autumn is here; the cistern in the corner of the walled yard is nearly empty, the wells nearly dry. We wait now for rain, after such a long, hot summer, when the plague was fierce at Pinios, our port, some ten miles off. It even reached its tentacles out here into the quiet farms of the Thessalian coast, beyond Mount Olympus, on the borders of savage Thrace. Soon the leaves will begin to fall from the olive trees on the slopes behind our fields. The barley and what corn we can grow here is reaped, the vines are stripped, the year’s hard work is over. In a month, or less, the winds will grow harsher, there may be snow on the mountains, even, perhaps, down here. The seas will grow rough; there will be storms. From now on we shall be living on the barley stored in the barn, on our olives, our onions, the meat we have salted down and what we can hunt and fish.

  As ever at this time of year I pray our stores will last until spring, that the tax collector will be fair, that there will be no raids and no sickness in the family. I pray of course that there will be no war, the prayer I have prayed for nearly thirty years now, since I was ten years old. I begin to believe there will be an invasion and war here in Greece soon. It chills me, even though these people are my enemies. Nothing is worse than war. I feel I have known it all my life.

  My own children have never heard the brutal music of swords and shields clashing, never seen what happens when the sword comes down on an unshielded body, the sudden gape of flesh and the bright blood springing out – they have not heard the terrible sobbing sighs and grunts of men fighting for their lives, the screams and groans of the wounded. They have not seen men’s lives put out like candles, not heard women scream as infants are tugged from their arms, seen them on their knees in the dirt, sobbing over their dead children. They have never smelt a city burning, that odour so different from the cooking fire, or the logs in the hearth, or bonfires of chaff and old leaves. Only the burning of old, soiled clothes or of rank meat can sometimes revive that dreadful memory. My children have had none of this.

  This is why I am writing.

  My servants look at me curiously as they go to and fro, fetching water for the house from the cistern, carrying clothes back from the grove where we dry them, carrying the last baskets of olives through the entrance at the end of the yard up to the stone shed where we keep the press.

  My maid Naomi’s little son stands in front of me wearing only a small shirt and little goatskin boots. He stares with his thumb in his mouth at the spectacle of his mistress making black marks on yellow-brown sheets. He is curious, being only three. The others may be waiting for some positive result from this peculiar activity – barely any of these Greeks can write, high or low. Their princes employ clerks from other nations to do their accounts and necessary correspondence. So the servants may well be expecting some practical result from my activity – that my pages will suddenly produce a bolt of cloth, a lamb or a calf. I have been mistress of this farm for twenty years, first a young wife, now a widow with the last of my five children married. How could they imagine this woman, thirty-seven years old, in the middle of life, to be doing anything but filling corn jars, weaving cloth, doctoring sick animals, binding up wounds? At all events, whatever they think I am doing they must believe it is connected with my land, my crops, my livestock, my family – connected somehow with a predictable future. But, sitting here in my blue gown in the fading sunshine, my concern is only with the past. I can write and I write easily. I shall enjoy telling my tale. Iphitus, my husband, died last year. He is not here to fear, or disapprove. My daughter Iris was married a few months ago to crafty Telemon, who now owns a few acres of wooded hillside, but will own a great deal more in future. So there are no matches to be broken now because the wife of Iphitus of Tolos is mad or eccentric and sits during the day scratching bird’s footmarks on sheets of pressed reeds, which cost her, if the truth were known, the profits from a whole year’s harvest, and the price of two fat ewes as well. There’s no one here to ponder, wonder and begin to ask dangerous questions. Now I can reclaim my skill from where it was buried, and tell my story in memory of my family and my people and for the sake of justice.

  Naomi, my slave, my old friend, guesses, I think, what I am doing. A little while ago she emerged from the house and stood in front of me, spindle in one hand, wool in the other, the embodiment of a good serving woman, and asked me some unnecessary questions about the household – were the twenty fish hanging in the smoke-house ready to come down; what had become of the two linen sheets for the biggest bed? She was trying to call me back to the life I have created for both of us. She was trying to pull me back to safety in time. She thinks if she can catch me now, like a piece of cloth on the loom when the web has begun to waver, she can unpick the faulty part and go back and get it right. But I don’t think she can, not now. I am at the right tension: not too tight so I’ll break, not too loose so my fabric will be thin and gaping. Now I need only to weave my story.

  Soon the wind will grow stronger and the trees begin to rattle. Snow will spit down the chimney into the fire and I shall set up my table in front of the fireplace and go on to the end. The house is empty now. There is no husband to whom I owe silence, no children to whom I cannot tell my tale. When I’ve finished I shall wrap all my pages into a strong linen cloth and give them to Iris. She’ll keep them; Telemon will keep her and their children safe during the bad times to come. He will betray his country for profit. His barren acres command the coast down from here, to the east, a perfect spot for secret landings. His disloyalty may help to bring down the Greek states. I have no love for these states and have seen too much death and bloodshed in the name of patriotism to condemn my son-in-law. He will ally himself with the victors, Iris and my grandchildren will be preserved. They may never sing heroic ballads about Telemon, but he and his family will live, and that is
what matters.

  Poor Naomi came back a moment ago, still carrying the spindle. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. (She guesses, anyway.) ‘The neighbours will see – the servants will talk.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Trust me.’

  She looked at me doubtfully and went inside again. She’ll return to the attack though, soon, no doubt of it. I shall have to tell her we are in greater peril than we have ever been, that what I am doing is the least of our worries. Nearly every night I dream of danger from the sea. The outline is misty now, as it always is, always has been, but each night the details become clearer and sooner or later the future will reveal itself to me, as it always has. I shall know who is coming and why. But when I tell Naomi, will she believe me?

  She was given to me in Troy when I was fifteen years old. She was anything between ten and fourteen; she did not know her age. She was lying in the stable courtyard, flea-infested and half-starved, wearing a torn tunic of filthy flax. She was beside a chained group of captives but they hadn’t bothered to chain her, just roped her hands together to prevent her from stealing. My mother, Queen Hecuba, picked her out because she noticed that Naomi, though half-way to death, as she must have been nearly all her life, underneath her fearful air looked fierce and intelligent, like a sick dog which still retains the capacity to decide, as you approach it, whether you have a stick or a piece of meat in your hand. My brother and his party had got her from hillmen in bearskins far to the north, but before that she must have changed hands many times already, during a fight, for a few pounds of salt, or for a young ram (she would not have been worth a ewe). She said she had originally been taken from her tribe in a desert far beyond the Taurus mountains by some Amorites, or Ammonites or Edomites, she could never remember which. She was probably four or five years old. Later she had only memories like a stray dog, of being cold, hungry and kicked. She had probably only survived because she was a skilled thief, thus the binding of her little hands.

  All she remembers of her childhood seems to be walking through deserts with her tribe. She was carrying a baby. Then, one day, there was shouting and fighting, screams and the bleating of goats. Then her mother fell, and after that she was caught up and dragged away. She remembers dropping the baby. Before that, only a mother giving her food and water, sitting under a tree with her brother; being carried sometimes on her father’s back. Also that she had to throw herself on the ground when their priests carried past a big coffer with two handles at each end. This, she says, contained the laws of her people which had been given to their king by a god at the top of a mountain. She often says if she knew what those laws were, she would obey them. There, Naomi’s respect for writing, and laws, comes to a finish. She can write a little, though, but chooses not to.

  My writings frighten her, but I shall go on, as the leaves fall, as the storms begin, as the winter closes down. I will not be silenced now. I will be heard. I am known as Iphianissa of Tolos but I am King Priam’s daughter, Cassandra. I am supposed to be dead. I will be heard.

  Two

  Troy

  Poor Troy, poor city, once my home. They describe it now as rich and stately, these singers in Orestes’ hall at Mycenae and all the other Greek lords’ halls, as the wine goes round. Rich, noble, proud and stately, they say (those who were at Troy, or now say they were), as they rehearse their old boastful tales when the singer ends his song. Rich, stately and noble are their plunderers’ words. It was my home before they burned it.

  The city lies some quarter of a mile from the sea, the beautiful Aegean. It had high walls, then, and great gates to the east and west. From the walls, the port, to the east, was easily visible.

  I remember that every spring our nurse used to carry us, my twin brother Helenus and me, to the ramparts to look down over the plain below the city, down to the sea. As we grew older we could take our short legs up the many steps which ran up to the great towers which stood at either end of the ramparts. Later we sprang up them nimbly, beating our nurse to the top, and there we all stood, celebrating the start of spring. There the sheep grazed in pasture to their knees, the lambs suddenly skipping up out of the green like clusters of white blossom, then sinking down again so that only the tops of their little white heads showed. There, too, were our few cattle and the many horses we loved and prized, foals running, mares and stallions grazing. Suddenly it was the time for the flowers to grow high in the grass, for the sunshine, for the freshly-rigged ships we could see at a distance, in the bay, to start out on long voyages. The city lay between two rivers – on the big one, Scamander, ships sometimes sailed, seeming to be sailing through fields.

  The year I remember, Helenus and I were eleven years old, twins born on the shortest night of the year. We were standing on the ramparts, gazing over nearly a mile of flowers, yellow and blue, down to the great expanse of the sea where we could see our ships’ white sails. There was a cool wind blowing. But a normal child’s delight in the sunshine and in the new colours of spring was spoiled that day. We both had prophetic gifts, a torment and a blessing. As we pestered our nurse to take us down to the meadows, the harbour, the sea, there came to me (and to my brother, too, I found out later) that familiar stilling, where there seems to be no sound, where everything has frozen. I was alone, seeing what I should not see, hearing what I should never have heard. I saw that sea of flowers in the meadow as a sea of armed men, saw bright sunshine glinting on helmets and shields, saw tents pitched, the smoke rising from stray campfires, saw tethered horses, heard their neighing and whinnying, smelt smoke and the smell of roasting meat, the odours of men, the smell from the piles of horse dung on the outskirts of the camp. It was not spring; it was a hot day in summer. This vision came in spasms, coming and going like the creaks and bangs you hear alone in a house at night, which you first attend to, then forget, then hear again. As I say, I think I had seen these things before, when we were both younger, always at the start of spring, on the day when all the flowers seem to have come into bloom at once. But this year they were clearer and more frightening.

  When Helenus and I compared notes at last, and found we had both seen the same things, my brother told me he always thought he must have been seeing ghosts. Indeed, he said he had hoped so, for if it was a vision of the future, it was a dreadful one. We were only beginning to understand the gift we had been given, or inherited. We were learning to control and interpret its messages. But this was beyond our understanding. All we experienced was the weariness and ferocity of the men below. We understood the soldiers were not our own people, though some wore our armour, carried our shields. And we felt fear.

  Scene on scene, in shattered fragments, crowded into my head on that spring day in my twelfth year. I could at one moment feel the cold wind, see the grassy plain, Helenus leaning over the rampart and Adosha, our nurse – then, again, the terrible sights and sounds of war. I did not know Helenus, too, was hearing the cries, the shrieks of men and the screaming of horses. Looking back, I am sorry for those two thin children (we were always hungry in winter, and sometimes in summer, too) in their woollen tunics, whose joy in spring was being marred by their terrible and unwanted gift.

  That time, I saw Adosha’s mouth open and knew she was speaking to me, then I began to shiver. I fell and she half-carried me back down the stairs.

  ‘Why did you say “the white horse is breaking loose” before you fell down?’ Helenus whispered to me that night in the great hall. We had eaten, the room was growing dark. Our parents had gone off to make up the day’s reckonings in the room where the accounts were kept. On the long table in the middle of the room some of our brothers were playing dice. Our sisters, some of the ladies and my father’s other wives were at their looms as usual, producing the cloth which was part of our city’s trade. We were crouching at one end of the long fireplace. In front of it were several men, some on a bench, some on the floor with their arms round their knees, talking and swapping stories.

  ‘And then the barren mare,’ declared one
, ‘produced twin foals next year, and then year after year, foal after foal.’

  ‘I thought I saw a battle,’ I said to Helenus in a low voice, ‘a lot of men, in armour. They were camped outside the walls. There was a chariot with two white horses, the driver was struck by an arrow and fell out. One of the horses panicked and started to break loose. It was very dim – it was a frightening dream although I was still awake.’

  ‘I tell you,’ said the man at the fireplace, ‘she would not produce a foal by the black stallion. I told Advenor. Would he believe me? No – so much the worse for him. I bought the mare.’

  ‘I’ve seen that battlefield,’ came Helenus’ voice in my ear. He sounded very sad. ‘On the sea side of the city. I’ve seen it in the spring but not much. Now it’s getting worse.’

  ‘You’ve seen it?’ I said. ‘What have you seen?’

  ‘Campfires, shapes of men fighting, all grey, like shadows,’ muttered Helenus. ‘I saw two men fighting. One brought his sword down on the other’s helmet. It split and the blood leaped up through the top, like water leaping up when you throw a big stone in it. I’ve heard yells, too, and horses screaming – clanging, like swords on shields, and I can smell it all, too.’ He was shivering. ‘Bards sing songs about battles, and tell stories. It’s not like that. It’s more like the slaughterhouse.’

  There was a burst of laughter from the fire, one of the women got her lute and began to sing, there was a fracas in the doorway as five of our big fighting dogs tried to burst in and were kicked back. There were cries for the dog-trainer. I could see, even in the near-darkness – there were now more cries, for torches to be brought – that Helenus’ pupils were dilated and his pale face paler than usual. I knew he couldn’t be allowed to stay as he was, any more than I could, when I was like this. When we had been younger the next stage was normally a screaming fit, or an attack of meaningless babble, where we said any words or sentences which came into our heads, or we simply stared into space for minutes at a time, unconscious of anything said or done around us. All these manifestations caused awe, or terror in the witnesses. We prize our oracles and priestesses. We know they often tell us the truth and advise us wisely. But we, Helenus and I, were very young, and very strange.