Meanwhile the snow had stopped. It was cold at midday, with the land sprinkled in snow, but it was starting to melt – the stones of the track down from the farm were already exposed. My guest must leave. If she waited the snow might return. I told her, politely, that this was the case.
Helen was reluctant to go, not because she was enjoying her stay or my company (she did not refer to my prophecies about her future, but I knew she dwelt on them which could not be making her feel any more at ease under my roof). She delayed her decision to leave, I believed, because she had no idea where else to go. Naomi had told me she was unwelcome at her son-in-law’s court at Mycenae. She did not want to go back to her husband in Sparta or he did not want her back. I dreaded that she would decide to return across the hills to my brother and Andromache. Her very presence could only be a burden to them. She had no understanding of what her part in the war had cost them.
I was at my loom in the corner while she sat composedly by the fire, her hand, as if out of habit, by her cheek, shielding the worst of the scarring, when Naomi came to me and whispered, ‘Is she going? She should leave now.’
‘I cannot compel her to leave.’
Naomi went to Helen and fell on her knees. ‘Lady,’ she said, ‘excuse my speech – if you do not leave now you may be trapped here for weeks, perhaps months, by snow.’ This was most probably an exaggeration. Helen stared at Naomi and murmured, ‘Then, then – I will speak to them.’ She fell to musing again. Naomi, with a hopeless and vindictive glance at me, suggesting I was making insufficient effort to dislodge my guest, left the room. But Helen, after some part of an hour, did rise, crossing the room gracefully on her damaged feet, saying as she left the room, ‘Forgive me but I must go and speak to my men.’
They apparently agreed with Naomi about the prospect of more snow. Whether they believed her warning or just wanted to be away from the farm, I do not know. At any rate preparations for their departure began.
Meanwhile Helen and I sat together. ‘I shall be sorry to go,’ she said. ‘This is a humble place but it is tranquil. Such peace is rare in my life.’
‘I do not think the peace will last for long.’
‘Why do you say that? What would disturb it?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
She smiled. ‘Ever the old Cassandra,’ she said. ‘Always these terrible prophecies of disaster.’ It was in this way she repudiated what I had foretold for her.
Her men passed to and fro, carrying back into the yard what she had brought with her. Helen, that great beauty who had perhaps doomed Troy as surely as if she had put a torch to it herself, looked sadly into the fire.
‘You will repose here for many years – perhaps marry again – some local widower,’ she suggested. ‘A good life –’
Could she really envy me the life she imagined? Did she imagine I would be pleased to marry a local widower who would take rights over my home and land and most probably work me to an early death? ‘Shall we trade places?’ I offered. ‘You remain on this mountain farm, perhaps even wed the widower, weave his wool and tend his children, scour his pots and work his fields? And I’ll take your place in the palace as Queen of Sparta? Perhaps Menelaus would not recognise me after so many years.’
‘Your appearance has changed little,’ she said.
This was not true. The waning of her own surpassing beauty obsessed her. She must see herself as grotesque, others unaltered.
‘It’s foolish to pretend you envy me,’ I told her. ‘You are the woman celebrated by the ballads. You have enjoyed all the fruits of womanhood. You are the most beautiful woman in the world, still – and you pretend to envy me.’ She was silent then. How bad life was for her in Sparta I could not guess. Menelaus was almost certainly mad, almost certainly hated her, almost certainly was dying. She must fear his death. It might not relieve her misery, only change its nature – without him the stored hatred of her people might emerge unchecked; her son-in-law would become ruler, taking charge of both kingdoms. He bore her no love, nor, it seemed, did her daughter. Did she imagine she might have to flee? This would have made my prophecy that she would die in exile more painful. She now returned to that prophecy as the servants packed food for the journey, even as I presented her with the small parting gift expected of me – I had so little, my gift could only be a small scarf, woven in fine wool, dyed with our local dyes, and depicting a white hind, crowned with a gold coronet, leading a line of huntsmen. This was a legend of the region.
As she put on the scarf she asked, ‘Will you give me another gift – my future – the truth this time, not a rigmarole designed to frighten me and pay off old scores?’
I temporised. As I have said, there is always a temptation to tell people what they want to hear, but to do so is impious and can be dangerous to those who abuse the goddess’s gifts. I asked her, ‘What did Helenus tell you, Madam?’
She scoffed. ‘He saw burning palaces. He did not see me. I tried to persuade him. He said only that he could not see my future.’
‘Burning palaces? Where?’
‘Here in Greece. Burning ships and palaces, men fighting. I told him he was mad. Perhaps his visions were memories of Troy. And,’ she remembered, ‘he asked me to tell you of his visions of destruction. He said that he thought you would know. But tell me, if he could not see me in a vision what does that mean? Not death, surely?’
There was something she was not telling me. ‘Did he say more?’
‘Nothing that I recall. Cassandra,’ she appealed, ‘can you not see something for me? We were friends once. I was of your family. Do you remember how we spent the day of the great Trojan victory?’
I said, ‘Helen, I have said, my gifts are gone.’ But I felt the depths of misery underlying her gentle manner and the perpetual, yearning half-smile. She wore a soft blue gown, the smile played over that half-wrecked yet still lovely countenance, and underneath, there was turmoil. No one could resist Helen. I was forced to relent. I put both hands to my head, like the village fortune-teller. I said, in the low, sing-song voice of a local woman, ‘Oh, I feel it now. I feel it, Helen. I feel the future – yours. Oh – alas – alas, sadly your husband Menelaus will die. Great King that he is, he is not immortal. We all must die. Helen – you will mourn him and then from a mist will come a king even greater. A great and handsome ruler, head of a strong kingdom. You will be his queen.’
She stood up radiant, exclaiming, ‘I thought as much. I had intimations of that kind myself. I have, you know, some small gift myself for fortune-telling and prophecy. And you tell me what I learned from an Egyptian at my husband’s court.’
‘They are very skilled, I hear.’
She frowned. ‘The Babylonian astrologer did not agree with what the Egyptian said, or what you have just told me.’
One of her tall servants came to tell her that the waggon was ready. We went to the yard. Within minutes she would be in the litter, the visit would be ended. We would be at peace again. And that was when one of my servants came down the hill outside, shouting and waving his arms.
‘What’s this?’ I asked Naomi. ‘What is he saying?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He went up to search for a missing sheep. He thought it might have been caught somewhere high up.’
‘He has seen strangers on the road,’ said one of my servants, reading the signals.
On a clear day from high up in the hills, people as much as three miles off can be seen. I was startled. Whoever was coming could only be coming here. And who would do that at this time of year? Helen’s visit had been exceptional enough. I could not credit yet another arrival. I looked at Helen, speculating that in some way she had brought others to the farm. Could it be her husband or son-in-law? Neither meant any good to me or mine. But one glance at her told me she was not expecting this visit. She was terrified, though attempting to disguise her fear.
I asked, ‘Do you know anything of this?’ She shook her head. I had the secret now, though. She f
eared her husband so much she thought he had sent men to kill her. There was no time to allow her any pride. If Menelaus had come for her he would find me, too.
‘Do you think Menelaus has sent men to attack you? Does he know you’re here? Have you told him where I am? What have you brought down on all of us?’
Naomi was at my side watching her face, as she replied, ‘Nothing – it’s nothing. He can’t know where I am.’
‘You told no one?’
‘I left my son-in-law’s court without saying where I was going. And I didn’t really believe Helenus when he told me you were here. How could I? I couldn’t believe it until I saw you. You’ve been dead for twenty years.’
The man from the hillside came up to me breathlessly, ‘A party coming here to the farm – four soldiers, I think, and a waggon, and a rider on a horse. They’re far off. It’s hard to see.’
Naomi was beside me listening. She asked, ‘Shall I shut the gates?’ I nodded and she and two men dragged the heavy wooden gates across the entrance to the yard. They were seldom shut for we were too remote for trouble. Sometimes there were robbers in the neighbourhood; in winter there was the threat of hungry wolves. But the gates were rarely shut. Formerly we had closed them when we were slaughtering – since the death of my husband I had ordered the beasts to be killed in the fields and carried in dead. The men had puzzled about this but I had always hated the carnage, especially when things were mishandled and animals were clubbed about the courtyard by farmworkers. Or when a panic-stricken, bellowing bullock charged blindly about, gouting blood. That sight, small wonder, had always horrified me.
‘Are your men armed?’ I asked Helen.
She nodded, but evidently lacked confidence in their fighting ability, as did I. They were large and strong but they were no warriors. She and I knew, better than most, the faces of real fighting men. But she instructed her men to get out what swords and spears they had while I went with Naomi to find the billhooks and poles we might have to use as weapons if the necessity arose. I sent a man off to the house of Telemon and my daughter Iris. I said we might be in trouble. But their farm was ten miles away. Help would be slow in coming.
I walked back into the house with Helen. On the way I asked her, ‘Are you sure you can’t guess who these strangers might be? If you can, I urge you to confide in me.’
She shook her head. I believed she was telling the truth. Inside the house I prepared to receive guests. For all I knew the visitors might mean no harm. I hoped they did not, but I was not confident.
Thirty-Three
Troy
Of course after six Greek ships laboured away under their burden of men, captives and booty, watchmen remained on the ramparts and there were men at the gates. The habits of war prevailed and we were still not perfectly confident the Greeks had gone for good. Nevertheless, that day we rejoiced. People drank and feasted. The soldiers made music all round the city walls. Children again played by the river. Denuded of trees as it was, the banks turned into bare earth by enemy feet, this playground nevertheless was a delight to children shut up for so long in the city. I saw two using a fractured Greek helmet as a bucket. Water poured through the bottom, which had been cloven by some sword with a thrust which had probably proved fatal to the wearer. On the sea-shore huge plumes of smoke came up from the funeral pyres of the Greeks who had been slain there. Deiphobus went to inspect the harbour and found inside one of the buildings two dead women, foully raped and left to die. They were strangers to all of us and all we could do was give them respectful funeral rites. The day was full of joy at the prospect of peace, sadness for the dead, and horror, as wherever we looked we were reminded of what we had endured. On the shore lay the huts behind the rampart the Greeks had built, the detritus of an army which had fled – cauldrons and spits for cooking, piles of clothing, bones, a midden and loot of every kind from an earring buried in the sand on the beach to heaps of armour.
The Lycians had departed, but the other troops stayed to rejoice and commandeer what they could. My father had posted guards all round the camp. What loot was to be found there, he declared, should be fairly distributed.
That night in the great hall we had a fire, over which we stirred a skinny goat, a stray we had found wandering as we scoured the surrounding countryside for food.
My mother collapsed and lay in bed with a fever. The exhaustion of war, and the loss of Hector, might, I thought, have killed her.
Nevertheless, the army was still mustered and a conference took place among the leaders about mounting an attack on Mycenae and Pylos, both, we imagined, weakened by loss of men and poor harvests. War is an unslakable thirst. We might not have started the war, but we had learned, some of us, to love it. We had victory, now we wanted revenge. Yet there were good reasons for attacking Greece. The Greek cities were still immensely rich, full of the wealth the Greeks had gained by trade and seizure. A successful raid would refill coffers emptied by the war. It would be wise to crush them completely in case they revived. And there was revenge – but if we attacked our enemies, it would have to be soon, before the autumn storms began.
I sat beside Helenus, as usual. His head drooped as the men spoke on. Pandarus the merchant was for the venture. He saw himself as the new governor of Pylos. ‘Now’s the moment to strike them, once and for all.’
‘Hector will be avenged,’ Deiphobus said.
‘Suppiluliumas will be pleased to extend his empire through us,’ Anchises said.
‘None of us will rest until Agamemnon and Menelaus are dead,’ added Paris.
‘More war,’ Helenus muttered to me. ‘Will it never end?’
‘How can it?’ I asked. It would have been unnatural, I meant, not to have tried to take revenge, and get compensation somehow for what we had lost.
Helenus took it another way. All those visions and nightmares from childhood onwards. ‘Torment,’ he said. ‘And yet we seem to have been wrong. Do you think our efforts altered what should have happened? Can man overturn ordained fate by his own strength and heroism?’
‘That can never be,’ I said.
‘Yet here we are, the victors, planning another war.’
Paris was urging on the laggards, those who were keener to enjoy the peace and to patiently reconstruct and recover what we could.
Though Pandarus was for the new venture, Archos was not. ‘Let’s get the harbour working again,’ he said. ‘Trade back to normal. Plant what we can for the winter. Lick our wounds, mourn our dead, consider attacking in spring, after the planting.’
‘If we’re restored by then, so will they be,’ Paris said hotly. ‘We must kill them all now, like cutting a snake in half with a spade.’
His words had the opposite effect of what he intended. Some thought Paris would risk anything to kill his wife’s previous husband, and avenge his brother. They sensed he felt some guilt for the war and wished to wipe it out.
My father turned to Memnon, the Ethiopian king. Memnon said, ‘We had planned to be here on campaign at least until winter. My troops are ready for battle. The Greek leaders are rich – why not get ships and sail for Greece?’
Archos said only, ‘I have lost two sons in this fighting. One remains. I will have nothing to do with this business. Nor do I think this prince,’ and he looked directly at Paris, ‘is thinking first of this city and this nation.’ And he left the room. He had given great offence to Paris, who stood staring angrily after him.
Helen was still in her guarded palace, now picketed day and night by a dozen mourning women who looked as if they were prepared to remain there. She dared not go out for fear they would attack her. She had appealed to have the women removed, but my father could do nothing. ‘They have lost their menfolk in this war,’ he told her, ‘and you have not. Let them be and rejoice that your husband and my son has survived, a hero.’
Helen was already pressing her husband to lay down his arms and make a trading voyage elsewhere – to Egypt, Phoenicia, anywhere but Troy, now a prison to her.
She dared not go out for fear of assault All day the mourning women remained as soldiers and musicians and local people who had come in from the countryside to talk to my father on a multitude of subjects all passed that mourning group. Sometimes they wept, sometimes cried out ‘Come out murderess, and let us look at you.’ ‘Come out, Helen, and I will send you where my son has gone.’ There is no doubt they would have killed her if they could have laid hands on her.
But others sang and rejoiced all day. By nightfall the atmosphere was frenetic. The musicians played louder and faster, people danced in the streets, up and down the city, from top to bottom. Many, of course, were quietly at home, nursing the wounded or simply sitting or lying, numbed and exhausted after the struggle. Many simply slept as if they would never wake.
Polyxena and I could hear the sounds of triumph, but with Creusa, Clemone and the other women, we were taking care of our mother and of Andromache, who, after Hector’s death, had shut herself in a room. She had been there for three days now, neither eating nor drinking. And there were children to look after, there was the amputation of a soldier’s foot in the temple area, a woman was giving birth, bread had to be made. Slaves had died or run away, servants disappeared. The war was over, but peace had not yet begun.
When the Greeks attacked three hours before dawn we were not prepared. The celebrations had gone on all night People, exhausted, were sleeping where they had fallen. The ramparts and the gates, as I have said, were still manned but that made no difference. It was not over the walls or through the gates they came.
The retreating army had not sailed for home, merely set a course which made it look as if they had. Then, as the result of a back-up plan they must have made some time before, once out of sight, they veered west for Tenedos and took shelter behind the island, invisible, though only a few miles from our shores. There they had rested, eaten and repaired their armour. Then they again set sail for Troy and before dawn were anchored in a bay beyond the harbour out of sight of the city walls.
Cassandra Page 33