As soon as he arrived in the citadel late the following afternoon, Talthybius was admitted to Clytaemnestra’s presence. This was the first time the herald had seen the Lion House for more than ten years and he was taken aback by the scale of the changes there. Though he was filled with admiration at the porphyry friezes and the gilded statuary and the stirring new frescoes with which the palace now commemorated some of the great deeds of the war, he could not help wondering how fully his master had been kept informed of the degree to which the hard-won booty of the Lydian campaign had been swallowed up by his wife’s appetite for grandeur. He was more troubled, however, by the absence of familiar faces among the court officials, particularly in the busy secretariats that dealt with home security and foreign affairs. Admittedly he had been allowed only a brief glance around the humming chambers before he was conducted along the passages leading to the Queen’s apartment. Nevertheless he was dismayed to note that, if it had not been for the chamberlain’s announcement of his name, not one of those serious young men would have known who he was.
Yet the Queen, when he came into her presence, welcomed him as warmly as a long-missed friend. Though she was clearly ruffled by his reports of the number of ships feared lost, she contained her feelings, declaring that at least the war was over and won at last, and nothing should be allowed to diminish the scale of that triumph. Her questions showed a lively interest in the part he had played in the more famous episodes of the war — the embassies to Priam’s court, the duel between Paris and Menelaus, the dire problems posed by the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, the negotiations with the Trojan defector Antenor. She listened with particular care to his account of the fate of the Trojan women after the city had fallen, and if she detected a certain delicate reserve when he came to speak about Cassandra, she gave no sign of it.
Eventually Clytaemnestra declared that she was not unaware of the streak of meanness in her husband and how it often left his servants feeling undervalued. Talthybius need have no fear of such treatment. The Queen would make certain that he was generously rewarded for all the loyal services he had rendered both to the High King and, more discreetly, to herself. He could relax in the knowledge that his future was assured.
More wine was served and the servant dismissed. Then the two of them were alone together and therefore able - Clytaemnestra insisted on it — to speak freely and in complete confidence.
‘We are old friends, you and I,’ she said, ‘I know that I can trust you.’
Talthybius warmed to her rueful smile. If the lines of her face had grown more severe with the years, a rare intelligence was evident everywhere in her grave eyes and the subtly understated sensuality of her pursed lips. Not for the first time he felt his own customary detachment yield to the brief touch of her hand.
‘Agamemnon and I have seen each other only once in the past ten years,’ she said, ‘and you will remember what happened on that occasion.’ She took in the herald’s uneasy nod and the movement in his throat. ‘The truth is that my husband has become a stranger to me now. So tell me, Talthybius — you who have observed him more closely than anyone else for many years — is there anything further that I have to fear from him?’
Talthybius shifted in his seat. His eyes moved away from the disarming entreaty of her gaze to where the yellow blossoms dangling at her balcony glowed against the bruised blue of the evening sky. For the first time in all his years of double service he was unnervingly apprised of what it might mean to be caught in a narrow pass between the most powerful man in the western world and the most powerful woman.
It was not, for all the Queen’s sympathetic assurances, the most comfortable place to be.
Clytaemnestra divined his difficulties. She smiled, soothed the back of his hand with the touch of her cool palm, and frankly admitted that after the atrocity at Aulis she could not pretend that there were any tender feelings left in her heart for Agamemnon. Her only interest was in the truth and, for that very reason, Talthybius should entertain no reservations about speaking his mind where her husband was concerned. She wanted to hear only the truth from his lips without any diplomatic hesitation about whether or not she would find it palatable.
A further silence ensued. ‘I sense,’ she said quietly, ’that you are keeping something from me. It will be better for us all if you share what you know.’
Talthybius released through a heavy sigh the tension in his chest.
‘There is,’ he said, ‘the matter of Cassandra.’
At that moment Cassandra was standing alone in a chamber of the fort at Aulis in a state as close to complete mental derangement as she had experienced since the terrible moment, almost half her lifetime ago, of rejection by the god. Almost as soon as she set foot on firm ground in Argos she had felt her powers begin to return, cloudily at first, unresolved as a neuralgic ache that left her feeling giddy and light-headed; but then with greater force, like a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure presaging a storm. Then, on entering this private chamber, her heart had begun to beat more quickly, her breath came in quick, panting gasps, her whole body began to shake, and she knew that the oracular god had seized her.
When such fits had come upon her at home in Troy, her sisters and servants had always been at hand to care for her; but here, in this foreign land, she was alone apart from those women of Aulis who had been ordered to attend to her needs. To them she was no more than a captive daughter of the enemy — a haughty, distracted creature that, for reasons best known to himself, the High King had chosen as his concubine. They stared at her as though she was some exotic specimen from a zoo, remarking on the elaborate way she dressed her hair, and the muskiness of her perfume, with an impudence that failed to conceal their envy and contempt. And they had neither understanding nor sympathy for her plight when the prophetic spirit took possession of her.
To be surrounded by hostile, gawping strangers was a torment, but Cassandra held on just long enough to drive them from the room. As soon as they were gone, her consciousness dissolved into a stultifying sense of fear - not her own fear but the panic of a young girl whose shade was still inhabiting this chamber. Perhaps thirteen years old, she wore a saffron tunic with a coronet of flowers braided in her hair. The dappled skin of a fawn was tied about her shoulders. Her teeth were chattering. And her mind was seized by a terror so great that she could neither think nor speak. Until just a few moments ago this girl had believed that she had been brought here to prepare for her wedding; now she had learned that death was the only bridegroom she would meet that day. She was trying to remember exactly what she had been told; yet what had seemed to make sense when she was first told it had become incomprehensible to her now.
She was to be offered up as a sacrifice to an offended goddess. The man who had given that offence was her father, Agamemnon. It was he who would be waiting for her at the altar-stone. It would be he who wielded the knife.
Outside the chamber a mighty wind banged at the doors and windows. It gusted inside the girl’s mind as she stared into the darkness that was waiting for her. She had been told that if she did not go consenting to the sacrifice then all her father’s hopes would be wrecked and disaster must ensue. Yet she had always tried to be an obedient daughter. She had always tried to serve Divine Artemis with all her heart. So what had she done to deserve this fate? Why had the goddess turned her face against her? Terror was beating inside her like a bronze gong. Iphigenaia had never felt so utterly alone. Never had she been so afraid.
And that loneliness, that terror, overwhelmed Cassandra now. Even as she opened her eyes to find herself alone inside a silent chamber where no wind battered at the casement, the dread remained with her, helpless and hollow; intolerably, unappeasably her own. Her hands were shaking still. The commotion of her heart was the panic of a trapped bird.
If he was not yet in a state of mortal terror, Talthybius was fighting a rising tide of anxiety as he became increasingly aware of the isolation of his position.
With a
ll the discretion he had acquired through a lifetime of court diplomacy, he had informed Clytaemnestra of her husband’s incomprehensible passion for Cassandra. Watching the Queen’s face harden as she listened, he had expected to become the hapless object of her rage; but it felt rather as if the temperature in the room had dropped. Clytaemnestra’s eyes were as cold as her mind. When his account had faltered to its end, she merely nodded and said, ‘And is this Trojan woman very beautiful?’
Talthybius glanced up and noticed how the skin around the Queen’s eyes and at the corners of her mouth had begun to pucker and wrinkle with age. ‘There are those who would say so,’ he prevaricated.
‘Are you among them?’
‘Cassandra is … He hesitated. ‘She has a certain strange allure.’
‘And does Agamemnon mean to make her his queen?’
The herald’s mouth was dry after the wine. ‘The High King entrusts me with many things,’ he said, ‘but the secrets of his heart are not among them.’
Clytaemnestra nodded. ‘You were ever a loyal servant.’ However she did not smile. ‘The question is, to whom are you more loyal — my husband or myself?’
‘I would like to think,’ he answered quietly, ‘that there need be no conflict there.’
‘Do not,’ she said, ‘be disingenuous with me.’
He was about to protest but she silenced him with a raised finger. ‘Tell me,’ she demanded, ‘what instructions did Agamemnon give you when he sent you here?’
Alarmed by the sudden frostiness of her manner, Talthybius saw that he could afford to make no assumptions about this woman’s good will.
‘I was sent,’ he said, ‘to inform you of his wishes concerning the triumphal ceremony that would await him in Mycenae. After the loss of so many ships, he is anxious that there be no needless extravagance. He has asked me to supervise the arrangements — in close consultation with your majesty, of course.’
Brushing that aside, Clytaemnestra said, ‘And did he not also ask you to prepare a report on his Queen and on her management of affairs in Mycenae?’
Talthybius tried for a weary little smile. ‘The High King is too concerned by developments in Thessaly to waste time worrying over his confidence in you.’
‘Do you know,’ Clytaemnestra said quietly, placing the palms of her hands together and raising the tips of her fingers to her chin, ‘I’m not sure that I entirely believe you, Talthybius?’
She saw his eyes shift away. She observed the tip of his tongue dampening his lips. He said, ‘Have I not always served you well?’
‘To the best of my knowledge you have,’ she conceded, smiling. ‘But then I’m quite sure that my husband must think the same of you; and I greatly fear, old friend, that the time has come for you to choose.’
As they advanced to the acclaim of the crowds from Aulis to Thebes and Megara, and then through town after town along the Isthmus road towards Mycenae, Agamemnon’s composure swiftly returned. Yes, he might have lost half his fleet to Poseidon’s rage, and half the treasure of Troy might have sunk to the bottom with it, but he remained the mightiest monarch that Argos had ever seen. His noble grandfather Pelops was a mere provincial by comparison. The kingdoms he had ruled in the west were only a portion of the domains that acknowledged the High King of Mycenae as their suzerain; and not even Theseus or Jason, adventurous spirits though they were, had crossed the ocean to destroy a kingdom as wealthy and powerful as Troy.
And all these people gathered in the streets, strewing the path of his chariot with flowers and singing hymns of praise, or running down from their hillside farms and holding up their children to see him as he passed — all of them adored and feared him as the King of Men. Also the weather had cleared at last. Bright winter sunshine glittered off the harness of his team, dazzling the eyes of those who stared up at him in wonder. Had it not been for a baleful stomach, Agamemnon might almost have been in awe of his own magnificence.
Lines of armed infantrymen marched at either side of the procession, keeping the more importunate spectators at bay and guarding the ox-drawn wagons that carried Agamemnon’s immense share of the plunder. Ahead of them, and far enough behind the High King’s chariot not to be troubled by the dust rising from its wheels, Cassandra rode inside a litter that was carried on poles by slaves. Gauzy veils hung from its roof so that she could look out from where she reclined on cushions and see the Argive peasantry squinting at the litter through the sun’s cold glare, but they could make out no more than a vague shadow of her form. She was remembering the day, many years earlier, when Paris had entered Troy in triumph with Helen carried behind him in much the same way. How strange the world was with its reversals of fortune! How comprehensive the imagination of the gods that all those reversals had been foreseen!
She had herself experienced such a strange, transfiguring reversal not long ago in that haunted chamber in Aulis. It had happened only moments after she had been inhabited by the shade of Iphigenaia, and the terror was still with her. She had been lying on the couch with her teeth chattering and her arms clutched across her breast, holding her shoulders for protection against the world, when she sensed a sudden change around her. Everything was silent, yet it was as though a deep-searching chord of music had been struck from a lyre. Now the air of the chamber was calm and filled with expectation. In an atmosphere so serene that it was impossible to sustain the fear, Cassandra understood that Iphigenaia had been standing in the presence of a god. Artemis, protector of virgins, on whose altar she was shortly to be sacrificed, had come to take the girl up in her kindly embrace. Even before Agamemnon offered his daughter up to the goddess, the goddess had already come to claim her. Iphigenaia had known herself under her protection. There could be, after all, nothing to fear.
Yet when Cassandra opened her eyes it was not the serene face of Artemis that smiled down at her, but the benevolent, far-sighted gaze of Divine Apollo, who was twin brother to the goddess. And she too knew in those moments that the god had no more abandoned her all those years ago in Thymbra than his sister, Divine Artemis, had ever turned her face away from Iphigenaia. He had always watched over her. He would be there, at her side, throughout the ordeal to come.
And with that knowledge the confusions that had darkened Cassandra’s mind for more than half her young lifetime came through at last into clear solution. How was it that she could ever have come to believe that she had been rejected by the god?
It was because, she remembered now, the high priest of Apollo at Thymbra had told everyone that Apollo had rejected her. The priest was an old man whom she had always held in awe and veneration. His name was Aesacus and it was to him that she turned for guidance when Far-sighted Apollo had visited her in a dream, asking her to become his sibyl. She had told her father of the dream and her father had sent her to Aesacus. The priest and the girl had spent many hours together while he instructed her in the mysteries of Apollo. And then, one hot afternoon — and it was this memory that had been distorted and erased by the shock of subsequent events — the old man had laid hands on her. They were alone together that day. She had been reclining with her eyes closed and her body entirely relaxed in the discipline of meditation when he loomed over her and put his hand to her breast. Shocked and dismayed by the expression on his face, she had tried to shrug his hand away. But he was stronger than she was. His weight moved over her body. She could feel him groping between her legs, tugging the skirt of her dress up around her thighs. He was making little shushing sounds as he murmured that the true service of the god required that she deliver herself over to him body and soul. She must understand, he said, that her body was no longer her own to command. As the servant of Apollo, Cassandra must do everything that the god required of her.
The thirteen-year-old girl had lain stiff as an effigy beneath the old priest. But the noises he made and the warm stink of his breath frightened and disgusted her. She could see the idol of Apollo staring into the still air of the temple. Then it was hidden as the priest lower
ed his face towards her. She saw the damp curl of his tongue. Her arms were trapped beneath his weight. Having no other means to protect herself, she spat into his open mouth.
When Aesacus recoiled in disgust, his body shifted just enough for her to slip out from under it. Cassandra ran out of the temple into the clean, dry air.
Later, when he was summoned to speak before her father, Aesacus would be grave and mournful. As King Priam could surely tell from her confused attempts to libel his own good name, he said, it must be clear that Cassandra was far too unstable to serve as priestess to Apollo. He regretted to have to report it, but in her incontinent desire to be made High Priestess to the god, the girl had desecrated his temple by offering her body as a bribe. When Aesacus rebuffed her, she had poured her execrations on him. But the god would not be mocked, nor would he see his priest abused. Cassandra’s words could not be believed, Aesacus declared, because Apollo had spat into her mouth so that all the prophecies she uttered would prove false.
Confronted on the one hand by an austere old man of the highest reputation and on the other by a hysterical daughter, King Priam had made his judgement. Eventually, with no one to believe her, Cassandra began to doubt the truth of her own experience. All she knew for sure was that the world placed no trust in the visions that came to her. But in those redemptive moments in Aulis, the shade of a girl who had also been betrayed by a father, had visited her like a messenger from the gods. Having shared all the desolations of fear together, they had seen that fear must pass. And now, as she lay alone in the swaying litter making its slow way to Mycenae, Cassandra drew strength from the certain knowledge that the gods always remained true to those who served them well.
The Return From Troy Page 18