Yet was it possible that for all the arid years he’d endured, and for all the bitterness still to come, there might just, in his hour of triumph, be a measure of consolation here?
A wary part of his mind could not quite bring itself to credit it.
Smiling, Cassandra whispered, ‘I know what you’re thinking. And I will answer your thought. Long ago I warned my father of what must happen if he took Paris back into his house, but he would not hear me. I warned him again when Helen came to Troy, and still he would not listen. So he brought destruction on himself, and though I spoke for the god, I could not prevent it. As for you, in destroying his house you are as much an instrument of the gods as I am.’ Smiling, she added, ‘We are not to blame, Agamemnon, if our true power goes unrecognized.’
Standing gravely before him, Cassandra removed two ivory combs and shook loose the piled tresses of her hair. Then she crossed her hands at her shoulders and pulled down her gown along slender arms.
Breathless, lips slightly agape, Agamemnon stared in wonder at her small bared breasts. He saw the nipples appear, dark almost as figs against unblemished flesh. ‘Come,’ she said and reached out an inviting hand. Then the King of Men was suckling gratefully at her bosom like a hungry child.
Helen, meanwhile, remained a prisoner in the city where she had always been a prisoner. Even in the days when Paris was alive and the two of them were still lost in their dream of love, she had never felt free to roam the streets of Troy or venture alone into the wooded hills beyond the plain of the Scamander as she had done in Sparta when she was a girl. Too many Trojans envied and resented her, so Paris was reluctant to let her stray far from his sight. And then the Argive host had come, and her enemies inside the city found larger cause to hate her. Helen had felt herself besieged inside a city under siege, and now that city had fallen and she was merely one among a throng of captive women, but kept apart from the others for fear they might vent their despair on the beauty that had brought them so much grief. And she lacked a single friend to comfort her, for even her old bondswoman Aethra, the mother of Theseus, had been joyfully released by her grandsons Acamas and Demophon, and would soon be on her way home to pass her dying years at home in Troizen or Athens.
Because the mutilated body of Deiphobus still lay in the chamber she had shared with him, Helen sat alone in the smaller room where Aethra had slept.
She had found in the bondswoman’s care the nearest thing she had known to a mother’s love since she had been a very small child, and she imagined that some vestige of that security might still be found among the things that belonged to her. But without Aethra’s presence the things were only things, and for many hours Helen had been terrified by the knowledge that, for her, there was no security anywhere in this devastated city.
She had tried to prepare herself for death but she had no talent for philosophy and there was no comfort to be found in prayer. It seemed that her father Zeus had turned his face from her, and to which of the goddesses could she pray with any hope of being heard? Aphrodite, on whose altar she had thrown away her life, had failed her already. Hera would not countenance the violation of the marriage bond, and Divine Athena, whose votive horse looked down across the city, had brought destruction on Troy and all who dwelt there. There remained Artemis, the goddess Helen had revered as a girl, but Artemis had not saved her all those years ago when Theseus abducted her from the woodland shrine. Nor had that goddess spurned the offering when the innocent Iphigenaia was put to her father’s knife on the altar in Aulis. There was, it seemed, no pity there.
There was no pity anywhere.
Outside she could hear men shouting as they plundered the house that had once belonged to Hector and Andromache. Somewhere a hungry baby cried. Black smoke gusted on the wind that rattled the shutters and agitated the trees. The whole world was in turmoil and she sat at the centre of it, isolated and afraid.
Soon it would be dark and with the darkness Menelaus would return and both her greatest fears and her only hope were fixed on that moment. If she could prevail on him to spare her again, then she might survive the fall of Troy. But if, as she suspected, Agamemnon were to bully his brother with primitive talk of honour and revenge, then she would never leave this room alive.
And there was no saying which way things would go, for when the world was turned upside down, all things were prey to the random chance of war.
How to better her own chances then?
Should she remain like this, unkempt and bedraggled by weeping, and thus make a last appeal to whatever reserves of pity might be left to Menelaus? Or should she brush out her hair, put on a gown that enhanced the light in her eyes, coax the colour back into her cheeks, and present herself to his senses as the woman he had always adored?
Either choice might work. Either could prove disastrous. She was incapable of decision. Then she remembered that what had stayed his sword in the moment when he might have killed her was the sight of the breasts she had instinctively bared. The beauty which had always been her curse had become her salvation. Perhaps it might save her again.
She had been sitting at her dressing table for only a few moments and was tying back her hair before applying the paint to her face when the door of the room banged open and Menelaus was standing there. She could detect no hint of mercy in his baleful stare.
He took in the signs of weeping round her blotchy eyes. He saw how pale and distraught her face. He saw that the hands she lowered from the nape of her neck were trembling. Menelaus felt an answering faintness at the back of his knees when she sighed like a woman renouncing all hope and said, ‘You have come to tell me I must die.’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it to be now?’
‘No, not yet. But tomorrow. You should prepare yourself.’
Her throat was dry, her smile wan as she said, ‘And how am I to do that?’
He glanced away from the beseeching reach of her gaze. ‘As best you can,’ he said tersely, and left the room before she could unman him once more.
With the naked bulk of Agamemnon’s body sleeping beside her, Cassandra lay awake far into the night, elated by the knowledge that at last she was coming into the fullness of her powers. This grim man, the Lion of Mycenae, High King of all the Argives, enemy and destroyer of Troy, was as pliable in her hands as clay.
Before he slumped into sleep, she had lain placidly on her parents’ great bed while he nuzzled at her breasts and kissed the soles of her feet, abasing himself before her body. Earlier, she had watched him mount to the climax of his passion like a man battering at the gate of a city that he believed he would never take; and when — already chafed by the force of his thrusts - she saw how his frustration must soon turn to rage, she whispered a spell in his ear that might have come to her from a god. His eyes had widened. The grim set of his mouth eased into a gasp, and he was crying out in gratitude as he released all the tension of his body into her unresisting warmth.
As for herself, the only pleasure Cassandra took from the act resided in the knowledge that strength was being purchased by her pain. And the shedding of her virgin blood had been a kind of investiture. Already she had known that sexual congress was charged with magical power, but now she had felt that power rising within her at every thrust, and in the moment when Agamemnon shuddered his seed into her loins, a net had been thrown over him that was as fine and inescapable as the net in which Hephaestus once trapped Aphrodite and her lover Ares. Utterly unaware of what was happening, the King of Men lay gasping in its trammels like a landed fish.
Again Cassandra smiled to think how the spell which he had taken for the key to his release had been, in truth, a binding spell. Agamemnon was hers now. He was hers as she would never be his.
Smoke and moonlight drifted through the window casement. The still night breathed about her head. Troy, the capital city of death, was filled with sleepers and the dead. For much of that night only Cassandra lay fully awake, gazing down the galleries of time to where her final consu
mmation waited: Agamemnon dead; the House of Atreus deeper mired in its heritage of blood; the city of Mycenae reduced in turn to ruin. Far-sighted Apollo might have rejected her all those years ago so that no one would believe her when she spoke. But soon, quite soon, every one of her prophesies would be fulfilled.
Cassandra was smiling as she entered sleep.
Towards dawn, she jumped awake, her head dizzy with a pain that felt both sickly and thunderous. Agamemnon still snored, untroubled, at her side. The drapes at the casement were blowing in the wind and a jagged light, the colour of sulphur, stained the darkness of the sky outside. Whether it came from the moon or a pallid sun she could not say, for it had a drastic, raw sheen she associated with neither. Her nose distinguished the mingled smells of burning and decay. Every cell of her body started to quiver with alarm.
Then the sound rose round her, a sound such as she had never heard before. She imagined the muffled groans of an imprisoned titan locked inside the earth; but then it broke louder on her ears, a harsh grinding as of monstrous millstones disrupted in their toil. Dust fell in a fine powdery shower on her face. The bed was shaking. The walls seemed to stagger before her gaze. Cassandra leapt from the bed and found the floor moving beneath her feet.
Agamemnon sat up clutching at the blankets as the bed-frame juddered round him. He was shouting like a drunken man woken from a dream. ‘What is it? What is it?’ But his voice was buried under the groan of the quaking earth.
The noise increased in volume, shuddering through her flesh, blurring her vision, hurting her ears. She winced at the panicked rattling of shutters, the creak and jarring of the beams. As though it was about to faint, the palace swayed.
Then it stood still again. The dawn air held its breath.
After several seconds she heard voices shouting in the street outside. A cloud of dust gusted across the room. Agamemnon jumped naked from the bed. ‘We should get out of here. The shock may come again.’
Cassandra turned to him and smiled. ‘That was Poseidon warning of his strength,’ she said quietly. ‘But calm yourself. It’s not yet our time to die.’
An Audience with the Queen
Unaware of the stratagem of the wooden horse and, therefore, that Troy was about to fall, Clytaemnestra stood on her balcony in the palace at Mycenae, gazing out across the olive groves and farms of the fertile valley at the foot of the crag. She was holding a wax tablet onto which her most trusted secretary had deciphered a message sent by one of her agents — a minister in the Hittite court whom she had suborned many years earlier when he first came to Mycenae as an imperial legate. The message informed her that Hattusilis, Emperor of the Hittites, had finally dealt with the unrest on his eastern border, and because he was unwilling to countenance a permanent Mycenaean presence in Troy, he was now considering committing the entire western division of the Hittite army to King Priam’s aid.
And if that were to happen, Clytaemnestra thought as she gazed into the hazy light that hung like a veil across the bay of Argos, Agamemnon’s expeditionary force was doomed.
Not quite a year had passed since she had taken her daughter Iphigenaia to Aulis, but her face had aged by much more than the months that had elapsed since then. These days Clytaemnestra slept so little and ate so little that her severe features were honed as spare as a windblown shell, and the vivid glitter of paint she applied around her eyes only accented the pallor of her skin. She might have been thought a decade older than her thirty-seven years.
The Queen of Mycenae had never been a woman to laugh easily or take pleasure in the trivialities of life, but not even her remaining children had seen her smile since she had returned from Aulis. More than ever, they were afraid of her.
Throughout the long night before Iphigenaia was put to death and during the day of the sacrificial ceremony itself, Clytaemnestra had been kept under guard in the fortress at Aulis. Had she possessed the strength, she would have struck her husband dead where he stood sooner than let him lay violent hands on her child. But this formidable queen, who had grown used to commanding the court of Mycenae in Agamemnon’s absence and wielding all the instruments of civil power in his name, was now surrounded by forces with which she could not contend. Those forces were masculine and brutal and would baulk at nothing - not even the murder of a child - to impose their will on the world. And so, for all the power that had accrued to her, the Queen of Mycenae knew herself reduced to what she had always truly been — a woman in a world ruled by men. She was as helpless before their strength as a nymph ravished by a god.
Once the first frenzy passed and she realized that no one would answer her shouting and screaming and beating on the door, she had slumped into a trance of self-harm, tearing at her hair and dragging her nails along the flesh of her arms. Then she had resorted to prayer, but to which of the gods could a woman confidently pray when Artemis herself, the virgin goddess of unmarried girls and protector of the young, had demanded the life of her daughter as the blood-price of her husband’s stupidity?
Both her daughter and her sister Helen had lavished their devotions on Artemis before all other gods, and what good had she brought to either of them? Helen had been abducted by Theseus even as she danced at the shrine of Artemis; and now, in only a few hours, Iphigenaia would lie dead across her altar.
And what of herself? Clytaemnestra had always given her first allegiance to Sky-Father Zeus, but she had fared no better. A long time ago Agamemnon had come to her in Elis and killed the husband she loved and commanded that her baby’s brains be bashed out against a wall. Her prayers and imprecations had been of no more avail then than they were now at the imminent loss of this second child to the cruelty of men and gods. Her heart boiled with the pain of it.
She had finally fallen asleep out of sheer exhaustion, and in the small hours of the night a vision came to her.
In the vision she had strayed outside the city into the foothills of the mountains. She could hear birdsong and the clatter of wild water among stones. Her nostrils took in the smell of a damp green world. Unlike Helen, Clytaemnestra had never been at ease out in the wilds and she was trembling as she walked. Thorns scratched the skin of her calves. Gorse tore at the short tunic she wore. Flies droned about her ears. The sun lay heavy on her head. The whirr of crickets ratcheted to an unnerving pitch of intensity. When she looked up, black birds were wheeling above her in the glare. She sensed animals around her, inquisitive and hostile, aware of her as prey.
All her life Clytaemnestra had been a creature of the city. She was at home inside the busy world of court intrigue. Politics, diplomacy, commerce, trade relations, the intellectual traffic of art and cultural refinement, all such civil discourse was the very stuff of life to her. And because her chosen world began and ended inside city walls, she had taken little interest in the natural terrain beyond except in so far as it furnished the material necessities of life. Yet here she was, exiled from all things congenial and familiar, in a wilderness where the single law was that one devoured only to be, in turn, devoured.
Clytaemnestra began to run and the faster she ran the more afraid she became. Somewhere at her back a horn sounded. Her heart thudded against her ribs as the world swept past her in a dazed green swirl. She was sobbing as she ran and when she looked down she saw that her arms were covered with black bristles. There were bristles at her face and she was squinting out over a lengthening snout through which, like complicated music, passed a whole medley of scents. Then she was down on all fours, travelling quickly now, thrusting her dense bulk forward into the cover of the brakes.
For a moment she stood panting there, torn ears pricked, eyes peering at the light, hearing sour juices swill in the low-slung, churning cauldron of her belly. Then she caught the sharp, hot stink of hunting dogs. A pack of them howled and bayed behind her now. Clytaemnestra knew that she had been transformed into a boar, a wild sow, bristly, tusked and muscular, and she was now the single quarry of this forest-chase.
So she turned and ran aga
in, scrambling among stones as she splashed her shoulders along a muddy water-course to scramble up a steep bank of scree. With the pack yelping and the hunter hallooing close behind her, and her breath no more than a hoarse, wheezing squeal, she burst through the thickets into the dim declivity of a cave she knew. Here she could turn and make her stand. Here she might hold the frantic pack at bay. But where she had expected to find a footing of solid rock, the soft earth sagged beneath her. Then she was falling, and turning as she fell, deeper and deeper into a vertiginous black pit where her bones must shatter when the falling stopped.
Clytaemnestra came to her senses in a place so dark and raw and ancient that it chilled her blood. She was alone except for a stone figure, only remotely human, that loomed above her. The charred bones of votive offerings lay scattered at its feet. There was, she knew at once, no exit from this place.
In a dim light emitted from the rock itself, Clytaemnestra looked up into the face of the Goddess. She found nothing radiant there, no virgin sheen, no curving silver bow. This was no maiden daughter of Zeus. She was far older than the Olympians, born of another primeval generation, an aboriginal survivor of the gods before the gods. A lion and a stag dangled helplessly in her grip.
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