Cassandra

by Hilary Bailey

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I said. I was ashamed. ‘I believe it might kill me one day. No one can understand – only you, and the oracle, and she’s given over to it She doesn’t resist. There’s nothing human and ordinary left of her.’

  ‘It’s unholy to resist,’ Helenus said, taking the other side. ‘There are punishments.’

  To be driven mad, to be torn to pieces by dogs, to hurl yourself from a cliff or stab yourself. I knew. I said, ‘Perhaps next year.’

  ‘Next year,’ Helenus brooded. We both wondered about next year – and so the day wore on, in silence and darkness. We slept a good deal of the time, but my dreams were frightening – a severed horse’s head, the sacrifice of a girl, but I knew it was not taking place here. There was an exhausted man on some stairs burnishing his armour, facing his death.

  Later, Helenus said, as though continuing the conversation, ‘Next year – it may begin next year. It gets closer all the time.’

  ‘This tunnel could be dug out,’ I said. I felt as I spoke that above the tunnel, on the hill past the open fields, the sacrifice’s blood had just now been scattered. The world had been celebrated, the libation of blood given. Now the earth would rest Later the grass would grow back, beasts give birth, trees grow leaves again. Now men and women would make love all over the fields and hills, each thrust, each groan, reviving the world. Then they would lead the priestess home. She might sit, all night, staring into nothing. No one would dare approach her. The next day, the day after, she would be my mother again, mistress of the household, Queen of Troy.

  We decided it was safe to go, and crept up, round the black stone’s pedestal, almost tripping over a woman with brown hair, a streak of mud down her face, lying fast asleep, face up. She woke, stared at us for a moment, then muttered a prayer and fell asleep again. We entered the temple proper.

  It was dawn and the floor was covered with sleeping people, some drunk, some exhausted. A naked man slept, apparently, with his eyes wide open. Two men lay embraced, a man and two women, the air smelt strange.

  The watchman at the great gate was asleep, too, stretched out on the paving beside his chair. We prodded him awake, though this morning ships would lie quietly at anchor in the bay, no carts would come in and out Nothing and no one would stir, for the world itself was resting. Only Advenor in the stables would be awake. The watchman fetched a man and a boy from the hut beside the gate and, together, hardly knowing what they were doing, they lifted the big wooden bar from its sockets on either side and pulled it to one side. Helenus and I pushed open the gates, went out and leaned against the eastern wall, watching the sun come over the horizon. The birds were singing, horses lifted their heads and to the south, a great flight of gulls came over the sea. The cool air smelt of brine.

  Eight

  Troy

  So that winter passed. One morning in early spring I rose and set out to warn my old companion, Adosha, for I had had a fearful dream that night, seeing her farm in flames and her father at the door of a stone barn, fighting off armed attackers. I said nothing to anyone, for I had exhausted everyone’s patience by then. Young girls can be tiresome and nervous, with their bad dreams and stormy behaviour. I had lost my footing in childhood and was stumbling on new ground. My tormenting gift of prophecy was never so bad as in that time of immaturity. I sat trembling and telling my tales, while the women swept and counted loaves and carded wool and tiredly hoped, if they were going to be told anything, for a good tale, not a bad one.

  So that morning in March, well wrapped against the wind, I set out on the five-mile walk to Adosha’s farm, going through quiet fields of grazing sheep, past farmers spreading seeds for wheat, greeting the few people I met civilly, until I reached the farm in the hamlet of Cassawa, where I found Adosha’s mother collecting eggs. She gave me a little milk and directed me further on to the home of Adosha and her new husband, and there I found her, alas, in the very barn I had seen in my dream, sitting by a hearth, feeding a big three-year-old child I recognised, even by his hands and feet, to be the child of my brother, Hector. The sun had come up, and we went outside with the boy and sat on barrels in the yard, with hens clucking round us. There was a stream a little beyond. With the dowry-money my mother gave her she had bought this little farm. Her husband, a cousin, was, she said, on the other side of the hill, digging blood into the vine roots.

  ‘I’m glad to see you,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long winter in this place, with never a soul in view. I miss the palace. There was life there, and company.’

  ‘Sometimes more than you wanted,’ I said, looking at the baby.

  ‘Ah well,’ she said, quoting an old saying, ‘“a child’s his mother’s until we learn who the father is, in the fields of the goddess”. But still I miss the palace – the silence here is so noisy I wish I were back among the old sounds, quarrels in the men’s room, pots crashing, loads coming in from the harbour, a caravan arriving, a horse loose, a bit of singing here and there. I even miss your screams, Cassandra. I must be mad myself. And this, I suppose, is what brings you here. Too much to hope you would come without a reason. More dreams and nightmares, a warning…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mind the child. I must go to the stream,’ she said and fetched two buckets, went down to the stream and filled them. She brought them back, went inside, filled a cauldron, and put it on the fire. ‘Good water here,’ she said. ‘Good land. A good husband – a decent-natured man who works hard. Well,’ she went on cheerfully, ‘now here you are, walking through the cold dawn, to tell me – what? What is it, fire, flood or famine?’ Those are the warnings the sensible Adosha might have taken seriously – would have stored food against famine, kept buckets filled at night in case of fire. I suspected she might not listen to my story of the coming attack on her farm.

  ‘The Greeks,’ I said. ‘The Greeks –’

  She smiled, the strong woman with her big baby. ‘Always the Greeks,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve seen them attacking this barn – your house.’

  She smiled again, but her eyes drifted uphill. Half of it was cultivated with olives, planted far apart, but at the top the old woods were still growing, thick, tangled and green, and beyond that hill was a taller one, cultivated low down, but heavily wooded higher up. I followed her eyes.

  ‘Let your family fight for the last knife and beaker,’ I told her. ‘You take your brooches and the baby and run uphill. Hide food up there.’

  ‘What have you seen?’ She was as sceptical as she had always been.

  ‘Your brothers fighting here, with armed men.’

  She shook her head. ‘Who would come here?’ But her eyes were now on a horse in a field. There was only one. He must be the plough-horse, the carthorse, the horse they threw a blanket on and rode when they needed to make speed in an emergency if a child was sick, if fire broke out and they needed men to help.

  I anticipated her next question. ‘I don’t know when. Soon.’

  ‘Cassandra – who would attack us? We’re only farmers.’ She paused. ‘I hoped – when you were older – well – that this evil gift would vanish. You’re tall now. A woman –’ she sighed.

  I said, ‘Show me the farm.’

  We took eggs, onions and bread up the hill and found her husband, a small, tough young man with a humorous gaze. We sat down among the lines of the vines, under a small tree growing on a hummock, and started to eat and talk. He was a good man, Tacho. Plainly he had no objection to the child, even if he was Hector’s. He was a son after all, who would help on the farm when he was bigger. The boy was proof, too, that his wife could bear more children. Not only that, he seemed to love him. A goat with a bell on its neck wandered up and tried to join the feast Tacho pushed it off but the child got up, ran after it, fell, cried out and it was Adosha’s husband who ran to pick him up. He laughed with the child.

  He told me his mother and father had sixteen children. As a half-starved boy, he had gone off to seek his fortune, drifting over hundreds of mil
es. He ended up working on the palace buildings of King Suppiluliumas’ fortress – or his father’s, he was not sure which. But the strange tongue they spoke and a winter colder than he had ever experienced – a winter he didn’t believe, snow on the ground for months and, if you were outside for too long, the danger of death from cold – drove him back home again. ‘Where I found almost the whole village dead,’ he said. A band of raiders from the coast had come the previous year and taken everything. Then had come famine, then disease. In the end, of his family only his mother, two sisters and a brother were left to work the land, so he had stayed to help. He spoke of the mountains he had passed through, drawn by the stories of gold and plunder in the upland kingdoms of the Hittite Great Kings. ‘And then, they say, over the mountains in the east was the land of two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, a golden land of palms and fruit trees. I desired to go there, but by then I was tired. I never made the journey. That winter frightened me. I believed in my own death then, as I never had before. I turned home, expecting to find safety.’

  ‘And found trouble,’ I said.

  ‘The trouble had been and gone.’ He looked at me politely, but there was a question of some kind in his eyes. Adosha had told him about me. He wondered if I had come to deliver a prophecy. Knowing Tacho now to be a man who had an understanding of the world, I told him, ‘I came with a warning – in a dream I saw your farm under attack from raiders.’ But all he said was, ‘Who knows, ever, what is going to happen?’

  Later, Adosha and I went back to the farm again, and I helped her dig over a plot for vegetables, then carry some heavy stones, which would be used to build another room on the barn, when the planting and lambing were over and there was time for the work. I embraced her and the boy and went back to Troy.

  Nine

  Troy

  Forty Greeks ran silently uphill at a crouch, holding their shields away from their bodies so they would not clash on their body armour, their helmets under their arms so that no point of light would strike them when dawn came. The night was dark, there was no moon. During the frantic, silent rush, the great walls and towers of Troy on their left a hundred yards away were, to their dark-accustomed eyes, a blur. Their boats landed, they’d paused at the estuary of the river, muddying their faces, hands and bare legs on the banks so that they would not show up in the darkness. They had followed the river upstream for five minutes, then, to achieve the position they required, just below the ridge and near the massive gates of Troy, they had had to break cover and race uphill, doubled up and breathless.

  They sank down in the chilly grass, quietly – only one man’s sword clanged against some other part of his equipment – gasping for breath.

  Menelaus’ young cousin Idas (born of a savage captive of his father’s, the result of a border raid on Thrace) looked from his streaked face at his brother, only sixteen, and, he thought, afraid. But his brother looked back at him and grinned. His slanting Thracian eyes gleamed with excitement and aggression taken in with their mother’s milk. Perhaps, thought the boy, this raid, which some had called wolfish because it conformed with none of the rules of proper warfare – which ought to involve only the encounters of strong men in daylight – was suitable for the two of them, came nearer, for them, to the stories their mother had told of mountain raids and ambushes. Idas was relieved his brother felt no fear, though he himself did.

  Menelaus, the expedition’s leader, crawled through long, damp grass to talk to his sergeant, Diocles, a tough Cretan, willowy, strong, no more than twenty years old. He pointed to the fig tree growing against the city’s great walls. He whispered, ‘That one – when the noise comes from the main army – get the tree down.’ Diocles nodded. Menelaus was relieved the trees he had remembered growing at irregular intervals along the wall during their spring visit were still there. Otherwise, the fifty men would have lacked a battering-ram for the heavy gates. His own party would cut down the trees while Agamemnon’s created a diversion.

  Agamemnon, brooded his brother, could fight and inspire men to fight, but he left the detailed planning to others, who trailed behind him, anxious, sleepless, hesitant. Had it not been for Achilles having seized the entire island of Tenedos, only twelve miles off the Trojan coast, they would not now be here. Achilles had not only looted and taken slaves but had left behind him what amounted to an army of occupation, small but terrifying to the inhabitants. By July, there had been Achilles, a hero of ballads sung from lords’ hall to lords’ hall, all concerning his victory in Tenedos, the firing of a city, the seizing of two beautiful women, daughters of a nobleman (what did it matter if the stronghold was a fortified farmhouse, the daughters less than beautiful?), and appearing to the other Greek kings more and more like a leader. With secure anchorage for his ships, a supply base on Tenedos, he was in a position to launch a raid on Troy.

  Whether Achilles planned this was unknown. It would have been like him to have no plan at all. At any rate, the sight of the capture of Tenedos had first made Agamemnon brood; then he mounted six armed men and went at speed to Sparta, where he arrived late at his brother’s palace after the fifty-mile ride, hardly stopping, with three of the men still behind him. The others had dropped out, they or their horses having proved unequal to the ride. He had gone furiously in to the great hall where the household was eating its final meal of the day. The men around the table were drinking their wine, talking, telling jokes and stories, when Agamemnon strode in, red in the face, already shouting. Could Menelaus and his friends sit idly eating and drinking while Achilles, that unpredictable barbarian from Thessaly, did exactly as he pleased all over the Aegean? Now he’d claimed Tenedos, leaving behind an army of occupation, taken his treasure home and was quietly helping his father with the harvest, getting their small sour grapes from their vines on the mountainside, seeming to all appearances just a farmer and devoted son, but – cried Agamemnon – with a treasure-house full of loot, fresh slaves for the farm and an heroic reputation. Hadn’t he, shouted Agamemnon, said they should attack Tenedos forthwith? Take it back from Achilles before he gained a firm foothold? Hadn’t Menelaus stood there with a stupid look on his face, not even considering the plan? Hadn’t Calchas discouraged him too? But already, at Miletus, in Tenedos, Achilles had taken the initiative. Now, unless they were careful, Achilles would capture the prize, Troy.

  Agamemnon had silenced the hall, filling it with his energy and rage, his cries and lamentations. A conference had been called. The noblemen of Mycenae and Sparta had rallied – two ships had been launched at night in secret, from the port of Tyrins, then, hugging the Greek coast, sailed all night and arrived late the next day at Aulis. They’d tied up in the small harbour there, then, next day, with a good wind behind them, sailed to Troy in a single day, creeping in cautiously while it was dark, anchoring in the bay and coming in by rowing boat, very quietly.

  Now here they were, seventy nobles and fighting men of Mycenae and Sparta – Agamemnon’s thirty men, hiding on the beach below, Menelaus and his Spartans crouching uphill, chilly with the cold of dawn. There was silence, very long for the men thinking variously of their fear, their hopes of victory, their families, the boats at anchor in the bay which, at a word from their commanders, would bear them home again.

  There was no sound from Agamemnon, who would soon call for a noisy raid uphill to the city, and no sound from the city itself, where the watchmen must still be pacing the ramparts, telling each other, ‘Quiet night Yes, quiet night,’ while their dogs slept on beside the fire. Troy slept in peace while the invaders all faced their moment of desolation before a battle, fearing lack of courage, and death, fearing for their families, for their parents dying without them, their children growing up fatherless.

  Diocles came crawling up to Menelaus. ‘The men are by the tree with axes. What are they doing down there?’ He nodded towards the beach. Menelaus shook his head. Then the noise began. From the shore came the rattle of chariots, the sound of horses’ hooves and jingling of harnesse
s. The warriors drummed their swords on their shields as they came uphill, shouted and cat-called at the city walls. They yelled out portions of a song-tale about soldiers attacking a cowardly army. Through all this could be heard Agamemnon’s shouting voice. Menelaus nodded at Diocles, who stood and signalled to the soldiers with axes to begin cutting down the tree. At a distance Agamemnon yelled, ‘Come out to me, Trojans. Come out to me, sons of Priam. It is your lover, Agamemnon who calls, I want to kiss you with my sword.’

  Meanwhile cries started up inside the city. Dim, moving figures appeared behind the ramparts – the bowmen arriving. Below, the warriors would be putting on their armour in a rush. Menelaus’ eyes peered through lifting darkness at the tree being felled. He heard it thud down on the turf beneath the city walls. As this happened Agamemnon’s tall figure, others around him, came over the rise. He turned at the top and waved his men forward. Chariots jingled up. Arrows began to come down from the ramparts of the city, but it was still quite dark and the Greeks were almost out of range. A horse whinnied, hit, perhaps. Agamemnon ordered his own men to start shooting back at the ramparts, a futile exercise, with the enemy so far off, but it distracted attention from the activities under the very walls, as two more broke cover to join the men with the tree-trunk and helped them run it along under the walls to the Scaean Gate.

  Once the small unit was in place, sheltered in the darkness against the gate itself, Menelaus stood up and signalled to the rest of the troops to move towards it. They started running. A voice aloft called, ‘Men running to the Scaean Gate.’ There were shouts, the sound of feet, a few arrows came down as they raced along. Menelaus’ young cousin, Idas, saw a spear thud into the ground beside him as he ran. An arrow caught someone, who cried out. Idas reached the twenty-foot gates, gasping, and looked round for his brother. With relief he saw him sitting against the wall, not far away.