by Iliffe, Glyn
‘You’ll be safe now – I trust these men with my life, and I know they won’t let you be harmed.’
Astynome smiled at him.
‘It’s not me I’m worried about. It’s you. Find Odysseus, but promise me you won’t go hunting Apheidas. He still has a hold on you, Eperitus.’
‘If you’re looking for your father,’ Omeros interrupted, mishearing their conversation, ‘we saw him heading up the ramp towards the palace only a short while ago. He was limping, but he still cut down every man we saw stand in his way.’
‘Eperitus,’ Astynome urged. ‘Promise me.’
‘I promise he won’t come between us again,’ he answered, kissing her one last time before setting off at a run.
Chapter Forty-three
THE RAPE OF CASSANDRA
How do I find Apheidas’s house?’ Odysseus asked.
‘Apheidas is dead,’ Hecabe said. ‘By now they’ll all be dead.’
‘Do you know where he lives?’
Odysseus looked at the old woman. Tears had traced clean lines down her smoke-stained cheeks and her grief for Priam had left her eyes devoid of life; and yet she had summoned the strength and courage to stand and follow Odysseus.
‘Through there,’ she answered, pointing down the nearest street.
It was filled with figures moving to and fro, their identities hidden by the flames and smoke that filled the narrow thoroughfare. As they watched, a wall of one of the burning buildings collapsed and fell down into the street, burying several people and sending up a cloud of dust to mingle with the smoke. The screams of the injured followed it.
‘Is there another way?’
‘Why does it matter? Even Apheidas can’t have survived this, and by now his house will be just another smoking ruin.’
‘My friend went there. I need to know he’s safe.’
‘Of course you must,’ the old woman sighed. ‘Forgive me. You can go around by the city walls.’
Odysseus took the Trojan queen’s hand and led her through the relentless anarchy towards the high battlements that ran behind Pergamos. Seeing Hecabe’s age, none of the pillaging soldiers tried to stop them as they picked their way between the dead and dying. Another building collapsed ahead of them in a cascade of fiery debris. Odysseus waited a moment, then raising his hand before his eyes forged through the dust cloud that had billowed up from the ruins like a wraith. Hecabe followed, choking loudly. A figure lurched towards them through the haze, but Odysseus knocked it aside with his shield. The scream indicated it was a woman.
‘Come on,’ he said to Hecabe, his voice rasping from the dryness in his throat.
They staggered on down the street, grey from the dust and ash, and reached the steps that led up to the ramparts. Odysseus placed a foot on the first step, but Hecabe held back.
‘Not up there,’ she said. ‘Down here.’ She pointed to a shadow-filled alley that ran between two houses to their left. ‘It leads to the temple of Apollo, next to Apheidas’s house.’
Odysseus peered cautiously into the alley. Everything was silent and black, but as he stared he thought he saw a movement, the faintest glimmer of polished metal in the gloom. Pushing Hecabe behind him, he drew his sword.
‘Who’s there?’
He was answered by a roar of anger. A figure dashed at him from the darkness, a blade gleaming in its hand. Odysseus raised his shield, blocking the thrust aimed at his head. He replied with a low sweep of his sword that was met by his attacker’s shield. They swapped more blows and in the confusion Odysseus could hear the man breathing heavily as he manoeuvred for advantage, guessing he was already at the end of his strength. With a grunt, the man swept Odysseus’s sword aside with his half-moon shield and followed by driving his sword at the Ithacan’s throat. It was a skilful attack and might have succeeded, if the arm that delivered it was not already weakened and sluggish. Skipping aside, Odysseus kicked out at his exposed flank and caught the man in the stomach. He cried out in pain and staggered back against the nearest house, the sword falling from his hand. The next instant, Odysseus had him pinned to the wall with the edge of his weapon pressing against the man’s neck.
‘Who are you? Greek or Trojan?’
‘He’s my son,’ answered a voice from further down the alley. ‘Aeneas, prince of the Dardanians. I am King Anchises.’
‘Aeneas?’ Odysseus said with surprise, peering closer at the grimed and bloody face of the man who had attacked him.
‘Kill me if you have to,’ Aeneas replied, his voice weak with exhaustion. ‘You’ll succeed where many have failed and gain your share of glory from it. But spare my father and son, I beg you. And if you’re willing, see them safe to Dardanus and you’ll be rewarded with greater riches than you will find among the pickings of Troy.’
Odysseus lowered his sword.
‘I don’t want your blood, Aeneas. Tell Anchises and your son to come out into the street. I won’t harm them.’
Aeneas spoke in the Trojan tongue and his father, a man as old as Priam but more bent with age, emerged from the alleyway. He was followed by a small boy of perhaps three or four years, who stared at Odysseus with eyes that had already seen immeasurable horrors. Odysseus stepped back from Aeneas and studied him in the fiery half-light reflected downward by the clouds. Judging by his bloodstained armour and the scars on his arms and legs, the Dardanian must already have fought in several battles that evening.
‘Hecabe!’ Aeneas said with delight, noticing the Trojan queen and moving forward to embrace her. ‘Then … then where’s Priam?’
‘Slain,’ she answered. ‘By Achilles’s son. And where is Creusa? Where’s your wife?’
‘Your daughter is lost,’ Aeneas answered, putting his hand to Hecabe’s face as fresh tears fell from her eyes. He turned his stern gaze on Odysseus. ‘So what do you intend to do with us?’
‘You can’t fight your way out, not in your state. But if you surrender, then you, your father and your son will be put to death.’
‘Even little Ascanius?’
Odysseus nodded. ‘Agamemnon’s orders are that every male is to be slaughtered, but I’ve had enough of his slaughter. I’m willing to help you escape, Aeneas, and I know a secret way out.’
Aeneas looked at his father and son. The boy stared back at him with blank eyes, but Anchises slumped back against the nearest wall.
‘I’ve had enough, Son. Let me die here – I’ll only burden you.’
Aeneas shook his head, and, weak though he was, bent down and lifted his father onto his back.
‘Lead the way, Odysseus.’
The Ithacan nodded and led them up the steps to the battlements. A few bodies littered the ramparts, but no living soul stood in their way. To the east, the sky was beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn, while below them to the west the great bay was filled with the sleek, black shapes of the Greek fleet, illuminated by the flames rising from the city. Signalling for the others to stay close, Odysseus followed the course of the walls to the place Helen had showed him only a few nights before.
‘This is your only hope,’ he said, indicating the hole through which he had escaped with the Palladium. ‘It doesn’t smell pleasant, but it’s only a short drop to the rock shelf below and from there you’ll be able to find your way to cover on the banks of the Simöeis. You should go, too, Hecabe.’
The old woman shook her head.
‘I won’t add to Aeneas’s load. Besides, I can’t leave without knowing whether any of my sons or daughters have survived. I will remain with you and let the gods decide my fate.’
Aeneas lowered his father from his back and peered down the hole in the alcove that acted as a latrine for the guards. He wrinkled his nose at the smell, then looked back at the burning city and listened to the shouts and screams still rising from it.
‘It’s better than going back into that nightmare,’ he said. ‘But I have one question before we part, Odysseus. We’ve been enemies for ten years, and if we’d met on th
e plains you would have done your best to kill me, and I you. So why are you helping me now?’
‘I’ve been responsible for the deaths of too many brave men already,’ Odysseus replied, ‘and not all of them honourably. It was because of me that Great Ajax killed himself. I’ve contrived the deaths of others, too, just to shorten this war and be able to go home. Worst of all, I’ve even dared to defy the gods so I can see my family again. These things must be atoned for, Aeneas, and maybe by helping you I’m taking the first step on a long journey back to virtue. Perhaps you will plant a new Troy – here in the ruins of the old or somewhere far away, but one that will last a thousand years and with a people that will preserve the honour of their ancestors. I don’t think that would be a bad thing. But now you must go, before the sun rises and exposes you to unwanted eyes.’
Cassandra lay between the feet of the statue of Athena, where the Palladium had once rested before the Greeks had stolen it. She was curled up in a ball, crying like a child as the sounds of murder and rape echoed around her from the walls of the temple. All night she had lain there, hiding from the drunken taunts of the Trojan revellers and yet fearing the moment when their celebrations would end and the belly of the great horse would open. And there she had remained, even when the dreaded clamour of destruction began to slowly filter through the closed doors of the temple. What else could she do? Her instincts had told her to run and hide, but her inner-vision told her there was no point. The thing that was destined to happen to her would happen here – Apollo’s prophetic gift had revealed it to her in all its horrific detail. There had been a time when she had tried to change the course of her visions, but the outcomes were always the same. Exactly as she had pictured them through the dark prism of her second sight.
And so she had waited, trembling with fear and stiff with the hard coldness of the stone. She had flinched when the doors of the temple had burst open and women and their crying children had come flocking inside, and yet she had not moved. And none had seemed to notice her, a small bundle of black clothing at the foot of Athena’s statue. Perhaps they had thought her dead, or more likely they had not cared for anything other than what their own fate would be. They soon found out. The crash of bronze from the portico, the shouts of dying men – a fight more ferocious than any on the battlefields of the previous ten years, as Trojans fought in defence of their families. The awful chattering of weapons had entered the temple, and from some of the female screams that followed Cassandra knew they had taken their own lives rather than be captured. And now, with the Trojan men overwhelmed, came the sounds of what it meant to be captured. Boys put to the sword. Girls screaming as their mothers and older sisters were brought down beneath packs of laughing soldiers. The sound of clothes being torn, men grunting and women sobbing. And then, at last, the thing she had foreseen happened.
Rough hands grabbed her and turned her over. A brutal, bearded face with a broken nose and merciless eyes – the face of the man the Greeks called Little Ajax. The large brown snake coiled around his shoulders hissed at her hatefully. Then the man’s mouth opened in a wide, lascivious grin from which unintelligible words came spilling over her. She looked away, knowing what would follow. The slap was far harder and much more painful than her vision had allowed her to guess at. It made her cry again, sobbing hysterically as she remembered what came next. Fingers curled about the neckline of her dress, slowly to make sure of the grip, then pulled hard. She felt the material tighten around the back of her neck before it tore, and then there was more pain as his fingernails scraped across her chest and broke the skin. He kept on ripping the soft, weak cloth, exposing her breasts to the cold air of the temple, revealing her stomach and pubic hair. She closed her legs tightly, pointlessly, and stared up at the smoke-stained ceiling where the faint outline of gold-painted stars still gleamed, the only stars visible that night. The man spoke again, urgently and harshly – the voice of a man used to being obeyed. But she did not obey and this time he punched her, filling her head with a ringing pain that vied against the pain of her knees being forced apart and the man pushing himself between them. He fumbled and she shut her eyes, more fearful now than at any other time in her life. Then he was inside her, hurting her, and fresh tears pumped down her cheeks, trickling into her ears and hair as she prayed and prayed and prayed for release. Even though she had foreseen that no release would come.
When it was over and, laughing, he had gone, she lay and listened, not even bothering to cover her nakedness. She had done it often as a child: lying still and attuning her ears to the sounds of the night. The fighting was almost over, but in the absence of resistance the destruction of the city was only now coming into its fullness. In the temple, she could still hear the women being raped, although their distressed protests had grown weaker. And then she felt something change – a new presence her earlier vision had not extended to. Men were entering the temple, but these were not a violent rabble: they were cool-headed and disciplined. For a moment she thought they might be Trojans, victors who had driven the Greeks out of the city and were restoring order. The sound of swords being drawn and the desperate cries of the rapists as they were executed gave her hope, such warming hope that she dared not turn and look in case it was destroyed. Then she heard commands, Greek commands, and her hope was conquered by returning fear. At least before she had been given foreknowledge of what would happen to her, down to the last, cruel detail of what Little Ajax would do to her. But this was different. She no longer knew what was coming, only that it was not her death. That she had already foreseen.
More commands, followed by running feet. A helmeted face stared down at her, then she was being lifted by strong arms and carried across the temple floor. Her head lolled, catching glimpses of the aftermath of the desecration that she had heard so vividly: a dead soldier slumped against a pillar; two little boys lying in pools of blood; a naked woman, dragging herself on her hands and knees over the flagstones. Then she was being lowered to her feet, forced to stand despite the weakness in her limbs, and not caring that the torn remains of her dress hung like parted curtains, revealing her nudity.
She saw a man before her. There were several men, but he was the one her eyes focussed on. He had long brown hair that had a red sheen in the torchlight, a neatly tended beard and a handsome but mature face with cold blue eyes. His breastplate was a rich working of gold, blue enamel and tin, with a pure white tunic beneath and a red cloak about his shoulders. As she looked at him, trying to remember where she had seen his face before, he removed the cloak and swept it around her to cover her nakedness. His eyes bored into her, strangely fascinated.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, speaking in the Trojan tongue.
She looked up at him but could not muster the strength to answer. Another man stepped up to the Greek’s shoulder – an old man with a grey beard and a wise face – and whispered Cassandra’s name in his ear. She heard Priam’s name uttered alongside it and knew the old warrior was stating her royal lineage.
‘You remind me –’ the first man began, before faltering and shaking his head with a smile. ‘You remind me of my wife, but as she was when I first fell in love with her. That was many years ago.’
‘I’m no man’s wife, sir, and not destined to be.’
Cassandra folded the cloak tighter about her tired, abused body. The wool was warm and soft, but its vivid redness threw her mind back to the newest vision to haunt her dreams. She was in an unfamiliar room, looking down at herself sprawled on a rich bed covered in blood – her blood. In the next room was a naked man lying dead in a blood-filled bath, while a vengeful woman stood over him with an axe. That man, she realised with a sudden shock, was standing before her now.
‘Who says you will not be married?’ he asked.
‘The lord Apollo.’
‘Ah, a god,’ he said, reaching out and running a lock of her hair between his fingers. ‘Well, I am King Agamemnon and I am releasing you from his service –’
‘You misunder
stand me, sir –’
‘And you fascinate me, Cassandra. You will come back to Mycenae with me as a gift for Clytaemnestra, my wife. Or, if you please me, as her replacement.’
Cassandra backed away and shook her head. Mycenae – that was the unfamiliar place in her vision, the place of her death.
‘She will kill you, my lord. She will kill us both.’
A frown flickered across Agamemnon’s brow, a momentary concern before the curse of Apollo smoothed it away with a smile.
‘You’re traumatised, and no wonder,’ he said, looking around at the defilement of the temple. He stepped forward and took her into his arms. ‘This has been a difficult night, but you have nothing to fear now. You’ll be safe with me.’
Chapter Forty-four
AMBITION’S END
Burning buildings were beginning to collapse now as Eperitus picked his way through the rubble-strewn streets of Pergamos towards the palace. After watching his father push Astynome into the pit of snakes and then make his escape, he had given up any hope of avenging his crimes. Strangely, though, the concept of him going unpunished was less bitter than he had imagined it would be. His relief that Astynome had survived was so overwhelming that, in comparison, the thought of killing Apheidas and wiping away the stain from his family’s honour seemed almost unimportant. Her words, too, had affected him. Her belief that the best way to defeat Apheidas was to be all the things he was not, and that to seek revenge was to become more like him, had struck deeper than he expected. Perhaps he feared keeping his father’s legacy of hatred and anger alive. After all, other families had carried the curse of their forefathers through generation after generation, just as Agamemnon and Menelaus were still suffering from the offences of their great-grandfather, Tantalus. The only hope of throwing off such a curse was to break the cycle of retribution. More than that, he was aware that with Astynome he had something to live for. The young warrior who had been exiled from Alybas all those years before, without a home, family or friends, no longer existed. He was older and stronger now, with a new homeland and new loyalties. The things that had driven his younger self – to see his family’s honour restored – had at last been superseded, if not fulfilled. And for a short while he had convinced himself they did not matter any more.