‘Boughs that don’t bend break in the wind,’ he said.
‘If they bend too often, they grow crooked.’
‘They grow all the same, and bear fruit. Remember that, Cassandra.’
I hated his justifications. Yet whether his advice about bowing to the wind influenced me or not, I ended up – perhaps to my shame – accepting things as they were, and living on.
We were twisting and swinging round bends, the sky above me was full of wheeling clouds.
‘Where are you taking me?’
‘To some friends at Pylos. I have a ship in port there. I’m leaving Greece – and poor Troy – far behind me. I’ve done with all this. I’ll give you to people who will help you, find you a husband. I’ll pay them. I don’t want you to die, like the rest.’
We said nothing more. We careered on. I thought of Agamemnon dead at the hands of his own wife. Later I asked him where Helen was, was she alive, but he knew nothing. No one knew. It was as if she had disappeared. And I thought of Aeneas above me, driving the rocking chariot, the man who had betrayed his country, caused the deaths of his king and queen and hundreds of his own countrymen, even his dearest friends, yet had for no reason I could guess, decided not to betray me, the least important member of my family.
Thirty-Nine
Thessaly
Helen had gone, Naomi had taken away her child. Diomed and I were alone, with much to speak of. But we had had almost no time together before we were interrupted. During that period we spoke, as was only right, of his father, the man who had reared him, who had died while he was away. He had been placed in a circular tomb buried half beneath the ground, according to the customs of this country. This tomb was on our hillside among the olives. Diomed planned to go there at dawn to offer prayers for his father, or rather, the man who had been to him all that a father should have been. He confessed, ‘When I found myself with Helenus and they told me who I was, at first I wept for you. Then I wept because the man I had always thought of as my father was not. I envied my brothers and sisters. Helenus tried to console me by saying I should rejoice at my noble birth, but that did not seem enough. Have you told them – Iris, Penelope, Phaon and Dryas – of this?’
‘I dared not,’ I said. ‘I never spoke of it, even to your father, though he knew. I was afraid for all of you. And it was not hard to be silent about those days. There was much I preferred to forget, or push from my mind. Of course it was my duty to speak, to tell my children of their grandparents, of Priam and Hecuba, and of my brothers and sisters, but the danger was too great.’
Then there was disturbance outside. The messenger had reached my son-in-law, Telemon, and told him that strangers were arriving at the farm. Telemon had promptly collected my son Dryas, Dryas’ brother-in-law and his tough old father. So a group of four, sturdy local men had all arrived on a waggon ready for a fight if necessary. Discovering that instead of trouble, Diomed was with me, there was great joy and excitement. Dryas embraced his brother, examined his weapons, embraced him again and wept. Soon they were talking excitedly. Meanwhile Telemon sent for my daughter Iris, and a further message went to her sister Penelope married to the harbour-master at Pinios. I wrote the message, knowing few could read. It urged her to be discreet about her departure since Helen and her retinue might be arriving just as she was leaving. Pinios is not a small place, but the hasty departure of the harbour-master’s wife to her mother’s home, combined with the coming of the Queen of Sparta from the opposite direction, might cause gossip and speculation. People are often ingenious enough to take unrelated events and on scanty evidence construct a story too close to the truth.
So Dryas was here, Penelope and Iris on their way and only Phaon, away on his ship, carrying wool to Thrace would not be here to greet the brother he had not seen for so long.
Happy as I was about this reunion, I still had doubts and fears. Dryas, Iris and Penelope were meeting their brother again after seven years, an occasion for joy, but the collision of Helen and Diomed seemed to me sinister and ill-fated. And I had spent so long keeping my secrets, and then, lately, only telling my story by means of those blackbird tracks on that thick yellow-brown papyrus, that I dreaded revealing my own past. But the time had come when I must do it and I felt the pain in anticipation – the pain of a splinted limb, when the splint comes off. In exile, from myself as much as my country, I had learned the frozen comforts of silence and forgetting.
Nevertheless it was a wonderful moment when Iris came in with her little daughter and early next day Penelope and her husband, both wide-eyed. Penelope exclaimed, ‘We left at night and even as we left the town, a troop of men, a richly-loaded waggon, a litter containing a wealthy woman it seemed, passed us as they entered the town. We could not guess what she was doing on the road south. Did she come from here? And where is Diomed?’
‘At his father’s grave, with Dryas.’
‘You’d best give your mother and sister a hand,’ Penelope’s husband told her. And so Penelope turned to, for by now there were thirteen of us in the house, Diomed, Dryas and his brother-in-law, Telemon, Iris, Telemon’s father, Penelope and her husband, Diomed’s four soldiers and, of course, myself. We slept on the floor, were eating barley and drinking wine which could hardly be spared. Yet another animal had to be killed. Everyone was enjoying themselves. My daughters made bread, a cauldron of lentil stew with herbs. We set up a spit in the yard to roast half a sheep, leaving Dryas to attend it in the cold wind which had arisen. Penelope’s husband and Telemon’s friends settled down to talk with the Egyptian soldiers and Telemon and his father-in-law took a tour of the farm they hoped one day would be theirs.
As we prepared the food, I told Iris and Penelope, ‘The farm belongs to you and your brothers but Telemon had better farm it. I will state this in front of everybody when he returns, so that there will be no quarrelling later.’
‘Will you live with us?’ Iris asked.
‘I shall be gone,’ I told her.
‘Gone where?’ Penelope asked.
‘I don’t know. It is something I feel. Look,’ I told her, ‘there are bad times coming. You must be very cautious, all of you.’
‘Mother!’ came Iris’ impatient cry. My visions, which of course had not completely ended with the fall of Troy and its terrible sequel, had afflicted their childhood. They took these periods of time when I was locked in visions for granted at first, as children will, then, discovering it was unusual, they came to dislike the times when I was not myself, not really with them, not about my proper duties. They certainly never believed what I told them. I spoke on, firmly, telling Iris, ‘There will be an invasion. Make no mistake. Telemon, your husband, will conspire with the invaders. Penelope – tell your husband that resistance will be useless.’
Iris, infuriated, left the room. Penelope, a quiet young woman, rested her hands on the dough and stared at me, kindly and patiently.
‘Fetch Iris,’ I said. ‘We must go on with the work. I have a great deal to tell you, and it must be said before Diomed returns. It is a most shocking story and best if we have something to do with our hands while you listen. It is also a dangerous secret you may not even tell your husbands.’
‘Mother – are you sure? You have been living alone for some time,’ Penelope said. She thought I had become mad.
I went out to Iris myself. She was standing in the yard, watching Dryas turn the spit. I asked both of them to come into the house with me. Inside I said again, ‘Before Diomed returns you must know this – there is danger coming to all of us. Dryas, you will be a busy man, making swords, not plough-shares and billhooks; Penelope, your husband would do well not to resist, to allow the harbour to be used by the enemy.’
‘Mother!’ she protested.
‘Mother,’ Dryas said patiently. ‘Mother – please –’ But I swept on.
‘There is much I have to say, some of it is painful to speak of, and at least for a time, no one must know what I tell you. You may not believe me, but you will
find out what I say is true in the end. As I speak, I beg you, do not interrupt me. As I say, the telling will be painful, more so if you question me.’
And so I told them of my birth and family, of the war between Greece and Troy, of the fate of my family, which was of course, in part, theirs. I was forced to tell them how, as a captive, I had been raped by Agamemnon, and how after my rescue, I had borne his child, their brother. I said that it had been for his own protection that he had been sent to Egypt. As I continued, I went on with the preparation of the meal, though my eyes were full of tears. I did not look at them, though I knew they were standing silently, staring at me. Then I looked up. Dryas, knife in hand, was frowning, trying to work out if he believed me or not, Iris looked blank. I believe she was comparing what I said with the stories they told and songs they sang about the war. She was adding up the evidence. Penelope believed me. She was weeping into the bread. ‘Don’t weep into the bread,’ I told her. ‘When you see your brother I hope you will all treat him with respect. The circumstances of his birth are ignoble, but you must not shame him. He is the same brother he was, remember that.’
‘This is the most horrible tale,’ Iris said. ‘If you invented it, Mother, you are mad and wicked.’
‘I may seem to you to be of the blood of the enemy,’ I told her, ‘and nothing better than a slave, a raped captive. Remember, the ballads you hear were composed by the victors. Remember, those slaves you see drawing water, being beaten by their masters, were once free, and brave. Remember, I am telling you of your own kin. In that, I do my duty to you and to them. You may feel obliged to reject what I say as untrue, but remember you have a child, and that child is the grandchild of the King and Queen of Troy.’
If Iris felt the shame of her descent from disgraced enemies, Dryas had different thoughts: ‘As a result of all this shame, nevertheless Diomed is a captain in Pharaoh’s army and I am the village blacksmith.’
‘Go with your wife to Egypt, then,’ I told him. ‘Diomed will help you.’
Iris was beginning to put things together. ‘Where’s Naomi? Why has she gone? Who was the woman – the woman on the road with soldiers?’
The light failed in front of my eyes. I muttered, I think, ‘I cannot say her name,’ and fell.
They put me to bed. Diomed told me later that when he came in, his brother and his sisters embraced him though they had had no chance to speak privately to each other at that time, the house being so full of people. I lay in bed, ice-cold, with a faint pulse and breathing so shallowly they feared, mistakenly, for my life.
That afternoon twenty soldiers came, snatched me up, seized Diomed and took us away. They were armed and ready. Resistance was useless. Before long I and my oldest son were standing before King Orestes at Mycenae. I should have known – I should not have believed her – Helen had betrayed us.
We had a long journey in a waggon guarded by soldiers. They had been told only that the Egyptian general was a spy, and his mother one of his informants. At first these men treated us with the same brutality and indifference they would have shown to any captive. We spent the first day tied hand and foot, lying on the floor of the jolting waggon. But at night, as Diomed slept on the ground and I lay awake, I heard one of the men, who was about forty years old, talking to some of the others round the fire, at a distance. I heard Agamemnon’s name more than once. I believe the man, who must have fought in Troy, had spotted Diomed’s resemblance to his former general.
The next day they were careful, even wary, of Diomed. They had concluded there might be more to this than the arrest of an enemy spy. Diomed’s clothing was Egyptian, but his appearance was not. My arrest, since I looked an ordinary farmer’s wife, made the whole situation even more puzzling. They untied our feet and we were able to sit, leaning against the sides of the waggon as it travelled. Meanwhile the soldiers with us in the waggon tried to find out more about us. We both maintained that Diomed was indeed a general in Egypt, only visiting his old home after many years away. Was their king mad, we wanted to know, to be sending bands of soldiers to remote farms far from his own realm, in order to arrest an innocent man, and, even more foolishly, his mother? Pharaoh, Diomed told them grimly, would not be pleased to have a captain of his snatched and carried off, tied up in a waggon, on the command of an arbitrary, petty princeling. The soldiers became increasingly uneasy. Jolting in the waggon, there was much we could not say in front of Orestes’ men. Diomed muttered merely, ‘We’ve had no chance to talk.’
I told him, ‘There’s been so much to say, no time to say it. I don’t fear Orestes. The fear comes from another direction.’
‘Do you know of the Sea People?’ he asked me.
The soldiers’ captain’s suspicions aroused, he interrupted angrily, ‘Sea People? What do you know of them?’
‘I am one of Pharaoh’s captains,’ Diomed replied calmly. ‘How could I not know of them?’
‘Who are they? What is the sea they come from?’ I asked.
‘An army, tens of thousands strong,’ he told me. ‘Egypt has already fought a battle with them. They sailed into the delta of the Nile and attacked in force. They were barely driven off. When I left Memphis ten days ago, a report had been received suggesting they were about to attack Hattusas.’
‘Hattusas? Impossible! No one would dare attack that city,’ I exclaimed.
‘Well, the kingdom is weaker now,’ Diomed told me, and then stopped speaking. A farmer’s wife seeming to have too much knowledge of other lands and nations would revive our guards’ suspicion that both of us were spies.
‘What people are they, these Sea People?’ I asked more cautiously.
‘They’re of many races – the Philistines, the Gasga people, old enemies of the Hittite king, Lukka pirates, Lycians, Lydians, some Trojans –’
‘Trojans,’ I said, astonished.
‘The Greek victory in Troy meant heavy Greek occupation of the coastal areas and inland regions,’ Diomed told me neutrally. ‘But it destroyed the system of alliances with King Suppiluliumas – of whom you may not have heard,’ he added delicately. ‘Forgive me, Mother, if my explanations are confusing. You have led a simple life and may not know of great empires and lands far off. However,’ he continued, ‘our country,’ by which he meant, of course, Greece, ‘would not yield to the bullying of the Hittites, would not pay tribute to Suppiluliumas, their king, but this breaking down of the old order led to instability.’
‘Treachery and disobedience,’ interrupted one of the soldiers, who no doubt served in the area and had bitter memories, perhaps of a comrade knifed while making love to a girl, or hunger caused by the population hiding food from the army.
‘Indeed, indeed,’ said Diomed. ‘But let us admit the kings of Greece could not control the area completely. Sometimes, in fact, they quarrelled among themselves – as we know.’ He turned to the older soldier who had evidently served abroad. ‘You were at Miletus?’
‘I was,’ said the man, unhappy at the thought.
‘Achilles,’ explained Diomed, ‘attacked King Orestes claiming that he himself had conquered the city of Miletus many years before and that Orestes should not be ruling it, taking taxes and so forth.’
‘Thus Greek fought Greek for this city you name?’
Diomed nodded. I did not ask who had won. The soldier’s face told the story. Achilles had taken back the city he had always considered his. It seemed the Greeks had taken over the mainland, refused to agree with Suppiluliumas, fought among themselves and lost control. A vacuum had been created. The disaffected of the area then linked up with the Hittites’ traditional enemies from the Black Sea and beyond and with others, drawn, it seemed, from the east beyond the mountains. These, whom they called the Sea People, had become powerful.
‘He is dead now,’ Diomed told me.
‘Even in our remote area,’ I said, ‘we heard that sad news, and wept.’ I had, indeed, wept for Achilles.
The soldiers exclaimed woefully, they spoke in praise of the d
ead man. I again felt great grief for that wild, angry, kindly man.
‘But these Sea People,’ I asked, ‘who are their leaders? To whom do they owe allegiance? Where is their capital?’
‘They have many leaders, offer no one allegiance, have no capital,’ he told me. ‘And they might by now have taken Hattusas.’
I bowed my head, to hide my shocked expression from the soldiers. If I were who I said I was, this information would not have had any great significance for me. I sat silently looking at the floorboards. ‘My fear was from another direction,’ I had said earlier to Diomed and he immediately asked me what I knew of the Sea People. The enemy attackers I had seen in dreams had a name now.
Diomed and the soldiers were talking together.
‘The Sea People have ships then?’ asked the old soldier, the one who knew Agamemnon’s face.
‘Many ships,’ Diomed told him. ‘And a big land army.’
‘You’re saying they might come here. No one attacks Mycenae. It’s too powerful. Too well-armed, the army too strong.’
‘If they dared to attack Egypt, why would they not come here?’
‘They would hear of us and fear us.’
‘Do you know the size of Pharaoh’s army, the number of his ships?’
The soldier said, ‘Well. The size of an army isn’t everything. If they’re attacking the capital of the Great King now, they won’t be here for a year or two.’
‘I expect you’re right,’ said Diomed, but only to keep the peace with our captors. He did not believe what the soldier said.
I again saw that fleet of ships sailing through mist which I had seen in a vision. I saw the dark hordes of raiders drawn from many nations engulfing the world we knew. But they could not, I thought, harm Troy. It was already destroyed.
For the second time, and again a captive, I was brought up the steep hill to Mycenae. There were indications that if Orestes’ soldiers did not believe the Sea People would dare to assault Mycenae, the king himself was not so confident. Anyone who had seen a city preparing for war would recognise that Orestes expected an attack. Gangs of men were putting an extra layer of stone all round the city’s thick walls. Once we were through the gates and inside I saw a heap of copper ingots outside the smithy. The smith was still at work, though it was dusk. Weapons were being made. Baskets of wheat were being carried into the storehouse. Diomed looked expressionlessly at the soldier who had told him Mycenae expected no attack.
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