My parents and Anchises had married me for strategic reasons, and now imprisoned me for the same cause. I could not be allowed to destroy belief in victory. People who had suffered so much had only to lose courage to be defeated. It might have been better for me if the promised troops had arrived from Hattusas, but they had not In fact it was too early (the Great King had promised troops for the spring) but people in their desperation were beginning to suspect we had been let down, or that I, perhaps, being mad, had been mistaken when I said Suppiluliumas had offered reinforcements.
I must have lain there for ten days. A guard brought me scraps of bread, and water. No one else was allowed to come near me though I wondered, sadly, why Naomi had not contrived to smuggle me some food, or a lamp, or a blanket. During that time the plague ran its course and began to ebb away. I was wretched – dazed, in pain, at first, from the beating. I could not tell day from night. I dreamed of my lover, Arvad. I thought bitterly that if my family were prepared to treat me so cruelly, I might as well have left Hattusas while I had the chance and gone east over the mountains to that sunny Phoenician coast, where I might have found my lover. It was destined that I would not, I suppose, but I was young. I believed and did not believe in my fate. Meanwhile, I endured captivity. We Trojans were reared to endure. While I lay there imprisoned, Achilles killed my brother Hector.
Lying in darkness, I heard the great howl of lamentation go up. I knew – I saw that long battle between the two strong men, while the warriors on both sides stood silent, watching the two heroes battle. I saw my brother felled, his blood draining into the dusty ground. I lay in my grief like one dead. I willed my own death on. What use to be alive when one such as Hector had died? I willed death with my remaining strength, but of course it did not come.
At that time, too, Naomi was captured.
Twenty-Eight
Troy and Thessaly
During the war we thought chiefly of the warriors who would win or lose the war for us. Now I must recall, for the sake of justice, all who died, whether fighting men or not. I must remember the women who died collecting food and water, the slaves and children who perished of sickness and starvation in the siege. I must remember the many deaths of those who never held a sword and about whom no ballads will ever be written.
Naomi was caught after scavenging ten eggs and a little sack of barley from a hamlet ten miles off. A troop led by Diomedes merely swept up her thin body as she crept towards the city gate at dusk. She was captured for a clutch of eggs and the makings of four loaves of bread. Naomi told me about this in Greece not long after my good husband, asking no questions, had got her back from the slave huts where I’d found her. It took her weeks to lose that grim, gaunt face. Then, one day in the fields, as we were resting at midday during the reaping, she’d told me her story. By then the war had been over for nearly two years. As we spoke beneath a tree in the barley field, my eldest child slept beside us on a blanket
The Greeks took her back behind their rampart, she said, and put her to nursing their sick and wounded. Initially she was chained with the other slaves, the Trojans and those they had captured from all along our coast. She was desolate, but she was better fed there and promptly formed a relationship with a soldier of Achilles’ troop, Strephon, by name. Her captors were from the hill lands of Thessaly, far from the prosperous coastal regions of Mycenae, Pylos and the rest: they were fanatically loyal to their leader and were regarded as uncivilised by the other Greeks.
‘Strephon was a boorish, rural kind of man,’ she reported. ‘No worse than many. In any case, what’s a slave to do? From Strephon I got a necklace taken from Miletus, also clothes and food – and I needed them, for you know how ragged and hungry we had become. I was unchained. I mourned for you, in prison like that If I’d been there I could have pleaded for you, smuggled you things, but there it was. I was a captive of the Greeks, you of the Trojans – war is war. I was better off a prisoner of the Greeks, I have to say. In war you live from day to day.’
‘I remember,’ I told her.
She shrugged. ‘A slave’s like a bundle, anyway, always passed from hand to hand. I knew some of the captives, of course. It was a relief to get away from the foetid air of the city, to be near the sea. Yet it was still imprisonment and the fear of dying was no less.
‘Agamemnon himself questioned me on the day I was captured. I was dragged that evening to his hut, hands tied and knocked about with the butts of spears. He was sitting on a wooden chair with the girl, Briseis, who had been captured at a city conquered by Achilles, Lyrnessus, further down the coast. Agamemnon had insisted on taking this very beautiful girl from Achilles, who much resented this, as all know. As leader of the Greek confederacy Agamemnon was already claiming that he was entitled to most of the spoils if Troy fell but Achilles was now challenging Agamemnon’s leadership and entitlements. Agamemnon had to keep the girl in order to keep his ascendancy over Achilles who was loved by the Greeks, as Agamemnon was not.
‘By the time I saw Briseis, she’d been through the hands of Achilles, and probably Patroclus, for those two shared everything, and then ended up with Agamemnon, joining him in his bed and his nightmares. She was speechless. They said she’d tried to walk into the sea and drown, but they’d dragged her back. The day they questioned me, Agamemnon was despondent.
‘They knocked me about a bit,’ Naomi reported unemotionally, ‘trying to get information about Troy. I said I was a slave in Advenor’s house, I knew nothing, only that Advenor’s wife hated me and did not allow me to leave the house. I’d heard no gossip and no reports.
‘Word of your visit to Hattusas, Cassandra, had reached Agamemnon. That was what he was most interested in – the prospect of reinforcements. It was plain they thought the city was lost, unless further troops arrived. Starvation would finish the war for them. Nevertheless, Agamemnon was miserable. Of course I said I’d heard nothing of reinforcements, only seen the Hittite troop you returned with. I tried to make him think the rumours about further troops were just rumours in a city full of them – I didn’t have to say much, for at that stage, as you know, Troy itself thought you had erred when you said Suppiluliumas would send reinforcements. Still, he frightened me, Agamemnon, with that long, grim face. We used to call Achilles “The Madman”. He was a boy, Achilles, all enthusiasm, and desire for glory and good times, all temper one minute, good humour the next. I cried for him when he died, in spite of his being an enemy. Agamemnon was the madman. You know.’
‘I know,’ I agreed, as we sat in the hot barley field trying to catch a breeze from the sea.
‘Yes, you do,’ Naomi said. ‘Well – shame came to all of us then. It’s a pity women can suffer all the pain and humiliation men can – and one more shame as well. Anyway, Agamemnon threw me out of his hut when he thought I could tell him nothing. My fear was that one of the other captives would tell the Greeks I was your personal servant and was always about the palace. There’s no honour in situations like that,’ Naomi explained. ‘It’s dog eat dog. We were pitched in the open air. No shade, no shelter. We stole each other’s food if we could. Then Strephon took me to his hut in Achilles’ compound. He patted me on the head once, Achilles,’ she said proudly. ‘That was,’ she added, ‘after Hector’s death. Before it, they said, after Patroclus died, he did not eat, drink or sleep for a week – he was roaming the compound and the Greek camp day and night, tears running down his dirty face, weeping and raging, mourning his friend.
‘The day after my capture and my interview with Agamemnon, Hector died. I was washing clouts – bandages, blood-stained rags – in the sea. I knew there was a battle. I was tired, so tired of battles. Then the screams of joy. Two warriors were dancing, embraced, beside me on the shore. More arrived crying out, “The war is over! The war is over now! Hector’s dead!” They hugged each other, feasted all night. At midnight I woke and crept out. Achilles was naked in the sea, lifting his arms to heaven and weeping. Such distress!’
Naomi stared out acro
ss our quiet fields, seawards – she gazed as if seeking Troy. ‘Such distress,’ she said again. ‘And now brave Achilles, too, is dead. Hector, Troilus, Paris –’ She broke off, nearer to tears than I had ever seen her. Then she recovered herself and continued. ‘They told me he would not bury Patroclus until he was avenged – by Hector’s death, of course. He raged for a week, then one night, he slept. They said that the morning he went out to kill Hector he washed himself at dawn in the sea. He was filthy, by then. He came to the council, stood up and declared he regretted not having joined the fighting earlier, the dispute between himself and Agamemnon over the girl had been foolish, the other disputes between them were just as paltry. The death of Patroclus altered everything. Patroclus must be avenged. It was, they said, handsomely done. Many wept for him in his grief over Patroclus, and for his noble behaviour.’
‘Which ended in my brother’s death.’ I was bitter.
‘True. But better to die at Achilles’ hands than in the hands of those other curs,’ she said.
Imprisoned, hearing the lamentations, I remembered the guard telling me, as he threw me a bit of bread, ‘Hector is dead! You will be next!’
‘It is all I desire,’ I had said, but he banged the door shut without hearing me.
In the barley field I said to Naomi, ‘Better to die at Achilles’ hands? Are you espousing the cause of the heroes? After all you’ve seen? You surprise me, Naomi. Death, in the end, is death, however it comes. These heroes are half in love with it.’
From across the fields where he was scything barley in the hot sun my husband, Iphitus, called out, ‘Woman! The boy is asleep now! Come and reap – am I to do all this by myself?’
Naomi sighed and stood up. She said, ‘I saw dead Hector from the Greek ramparts by the shore as Achilles dragged him day after day round the plain of Troy. Even the Greeks were weeping. One shouted at Achilles, “Barbarian!” There was a silence throughout the Greek camp as Achilles continued his maltreatment of your brother’s corpse. But no one, not even Agamemnon, or Calchas the priest, dared reproach him. By then, in his heroism and great grief for Patroclus, he seemed to be in the hands of a god. Untouchable. Also, each man feared that if he reproached Achilles, Achilles would strike him down.’
Iphitus cried out again, ‘Are you going to gossip forever?’ and I, too, stood up, picked up my scythe. I looked down at my sleeping son and said to Naomi, ‘We must not speak of these things.’ Then I crossed the field and began to reap beside my husband.
Twenty-Nine
Troy
After Hector’s death they released me from my prison. My eyes blinked in the unaccustomed light as they led me, filthy and starving, to the ramparts to see my brother, his heels pierced and thongs threaded through, being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot round and round the plain of Troy. Achilles, ‘The Madman’, whipped up his horses, tugging at the bit until the horses’ mouths were sprayed with blood and foam. This was the third day of this cruel spectacle.
Next morning, from the ramparts, we saw Hector’s body still attached to the chariot, lying by Patroclus’ cold funeral pyre. At that distance, the chariot looked like a child’s toy cart lying in a corner, Hector’s body like a rag doll beside it. My father arrived with gifts and ransomed Hector’s body. Then came his funeral. As his body burned on the pyre behind Troy, the Greek soldiers stood silently at a distance. Ostensibly they were there to guard us, but we knew they came to honour Hector as a brave and honourable man. The ceremony was all but over when a Greek messenger galloped up to them from Troy. They turned and with all speed, and evidently alarmed, raced on horseback past Troy back to their camp.
The Ethiopians were coming. We wondered, standing at Hector’s funeral pyre, about the sudden retreat of the Greeks, then the long column of fifty mounted men came towards us. There were a hundred infantrymen behind them. We were amazed by the arrival of those soldiers. One of the black men had a lion-skin over his back, the other that of a huge, spotted beast, a great cat. Its feet trailed down behind him to the ground. Its head lay on his back. We were aghast, not knowing what this could mean.
Another of them, young and pale-skinned, came up to my father, leading his horse. ‘Uncle,’ he greeted my father and embraced him. In his grief my father, his face smeared with the ashes of Hector’s pyre, did not recognise him. It was Memnon, his nephew, his brother’s child. This man was married to Candace, the Ethiopian queen, and lived in huge splendour in her palace at Saba. These Ethiopians were of two races: the ‘burnt-faces’ as the Greeks termed them, came from the more southerly part of the country, the paler ones from the north, nearer Egypt The country traded in valuable wood and in gold and ivory. It was fertile and immensely rich.
Naomi told me later the Greeks were terrified of these ‘burnt-face’ men. They thought they were dead, and being already dead, could not be killed in battle. They would be invincible.
The Ethiopians had come at the instigation of the Pharaoh of Egypt, who at that time had control, though it was dwindling, over the kingdom of Ethiopia. This arrangement had been urged by Suppiluliumas, reluctant to commit too many of his own troops to Troy, but ready to put pressure on an ally to do so. Behind war is always the pull and tug of alliance, self interest, trade. In this case Pharaoh, wanting Hittite iron and wanting to please the Hittite king, had promised assistance from the kingdom of Ethiopia. Memnon, the king of Ethiopia, was young and wanted war and booty; he was also a relative of my father’s. So it was that these men, with their long spears, the pelts of strange animals slung over their shoulders had arrived from the west, halted outside the city, but found the gates shut (the city was empty but for the wounded) and had come to us as we watched the smoke from Hector’s pyre rising up into the blue, blue sky.
We took it in turns to sit all night with Andromache, who was in a most pitiable state, sometimes lying on her bed, then agitatedly rising, to pace the room, weeping, unable to bear that bed she would never again share with her husband. Sometimes she was silent, her face a mask of misery. Sometimes she wandered wildly from room to room, moaning, weeping, clutching at her head. Sometimes she clasped her arms round her body, bowing over, groaning, like a woman in the final stages of childbirth.
‘He was a hero, never to be forgotten,’ I told her. ‘And you have his son.’
I thought when my mother asked me to stay with Andromache, that my dead brother’s wife might refuse to have me near her, might curse me for my prediction of Hector’s death. She did not. She even said, in the normal voice people can produce from time to time when they are in agony, ‘If we had listened – if I had listened – I could have kept him from the battle that day. Don’t you think so, Cassandra? I could have detained him.’
I could only say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Then she broke down again, flung herself against the wall, and facing it, supporting herself on her arms, wept, ‘He will be forgotten. Hero? Yes. But how long is a hero remembered?’
‘Forever.’
She shook her head. ‘For a few generations, no more. He is dust, in the ground and in people’s minds. I do not want a dead hero,’ she then wept. ‘I want a live Hector, a coward Hector, if need be. Remember him,’ she sobbed. ‘Remember him.’
‘He will be remembered.’
Towards dawn my mother came, as so often, with a strong draught for her. She collapsed into a heavy, drugged sleep, from which, poor thing, she would awake all too soon to remember her husband was dead.
Just before dawn the city gates were flung open and, in the half light, an army such as has never been seen before left our gates. The Trojan allies, desperate to avenge Hector’s death, were given heart because of the newly-arrived Ethiopians. The spectacle of fresh cavalry and a hundred infantrymen, many black, bearing their long pointed shields and long spears, terrified the Greeks. These Ethiopians wore no helmets, only the skins of the ferocious beasts of their country, as a kind of magical protection to them.
The Greeks stood by their rampart, in ranks. Their b
owmen were aloft on its wall. As the Trojan forces grimly advanced, none of the Greeks turned and ran, though each must have feared that he would die in battle that day. The tall figures of Agamemnon and Menelaus were in the centre as our troops moved forward. To the right were Achilles and his Myrmidons, in a solid phalanx. Diomedes, Ajax and Nestor were to the left. As our troops swooped down, blind Calchas, their prophet and magician holding aloft his staff, offered up a prayer, a curse or a spell, I don’t know which. He too, old as he was, held his ground until the very last moment, then was pulled back by the mighty arms of Ajax.
For four long hours, until the sun was high, the struggle continued. The Greeks died in large numbers by their rampart. Many were driven back into the stake-filled ditch. They retreated through their gates, across the causeway, over their moat, fighting every inch. They formed up at either end of the wall, to protect the ships.
From the tower above our ramparts Trojans began to signal frantically to the faraway troops, who were in desperate combat. Finally Paris, in his chariot who had retreated to muster his men, observed the wild signals. ‘Ships!’ they were crying. ‘Ships.’ It was an approaching fleet, ten or twelve ships heading for Troy, where no fleet came. They were Greek reinforcements. By the time Paris spotted them, the ships, under sail, and rowing, were also within sight of the Greeks on the shore. The battle became more urgent on our side – if there were reinforcements they must arrive to find the battle over, the Trojans on shore to greet them. But the Greeks, relief at hand, resisted more strongly. As the ships came closer, Paris, who, with Aeneas, had taken over command since Hector’s death, gave the order to retreat The warriors were exhausted. There was no point in fighting on, at midday, only to be attacked by fresh forces which might number some three hundred men.
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