“Please don't tell about my short hair.”
“No. I wouldn't do that. Especially in Troy. And your turban is most attractive, although I have not thought of a compliment for the cap. When I see you in the spring, your hair will be long again.”
Again we walked slowly. We took turns carrying the puppy, who slept on.
Euneus said carefully, “I do believe there will be war, Callisto. Menelaus will return to his brother Agamemnon, lord of the far-flung lands. Menelaus will call upon every prince who swore in the Blood of the Horse to be loyal to him. In the spring, they will attack. Hector and I spent much time discussing it. But tell me, little princess. Why are you preparing? What's the slingshot for?”
I could not tell him what the slingshot was for, because I didn't know. I wasn't going to take aim between Paris' eyes, or Helen's. I wasn't going to herd Pleis in front of me like a wayward sheep.
But I wanted to have the ability.
I mumbled the same ridiculous story I'd given Aethiolas and Maraphius, about how my father the king had raised me as a boy, having had to bury five infant sons in the walls. And then I burst out, “Will you be loyal to Troy, Euneus? Tell me, for I don't know what to do. Everyone here is so good to me. But Menelaus rescued me. He trusted me, even though I am unworthy. And I love his son, the little prince.”
“It's difficult,” admitted Euneus. “Hector wants me to commit to Troy. I want to be neutral. He says there is no such thing as neutral in war.”
I had seen my king stabbed in the back. I had seen a queen made to walk over her husband's body. I had seen Pyros die with his bowels spilled on the earth for the dogs to eat. I had seen the king of Sidon just a pile of rags on a table. And that was not even war, just pirating. I dreaded war. “Aethra says that Helen's father was Madness, Hate, red Death and every rotting poison of the sky.”
Euneus actually laughed. “I don't think she's that bad.”
But he was wrong.
I opened my mouth to beseech Euneus, when he left Troy, to take Pleis with him. With Euneus neutral, Menelaus would pause in his harbor. Euneus could—
But if Euneus took the son of Helen, he would not be neutral. He might as well forge a treaty with Menelaus. Hector would hate Euneus. Not only would their friendship be over, but war might begin between Euneus and Troy, instead of Menelaus and Troy.
“What is wrong, little princess?” said the king of Lemnos gravely.
“Helen hates dogs. They shed and get fleas and make a mess. Euneus, I love this puppy already. I want to have her this winter to keep my heart and feet warm, but I cannot. Will you keep her for me? When you sail back in spring, will you bring her with you?”
He stared at the cold gray water of the bay. “From here we cannot see my island,” he said, “but Cassandra can, from the height of her prison. Yes, I'll take the puppy, Callisto. But you name her for me.”
I had the name ready. “Anthas.”
“Flower,” he repeated. “It's perfect.”
We never did try out the sling. He showed me other things that were perfect and when we said goodbye, I put the amber bead in his hand and tucked his fingers around it and we both knew that he might not come in the spring, for war might come first.
As it happened, the next morning dawned clear and sunny and warm. Euneus would leave this day, for it was sailing weather. Hector summoned Andromache and me to bid the king of Lemnos goodbye. Euneus was surrounded by a dozen sons of Priam, princes trying to convince Euneus not to be neutral, but to commit his army to Troy.
It was a parting of soldiers, full of offers and anger. There was no room for first love. I could only wave goodbye, for not even Andromache knew what had sprung up between us.
I wished I had thought to tell Euneus about keeping-track lines. I wished there were a line to keep track of the heart. But even if such a thing could be designed, ships did not sail in the winter, and I could send no clay tablet to testify.
A week later there was snow.
The mountains of Ida were shrouded like great corpses awaiting burial. Drifts covered the gray salt surf, and the breakers moaned under heavy slush. To ease a city worried about a harsh winter, King Priam held a banquet.
Cassandra was permitted to join the feast.
“Priam hates locking her up,” Andromache confided. “Hector hates it even more, for he loves his sister.”
I had not yet laid eyes on Cassandra and somehow expected crooked teeth like a hungry animal, greasy hair and starved eyes. But Cassandra was beautiful, as lovely as Helen, though not honey and spice. Beautiful like the snow in the dark.
Cassandra sat next to her father and mother, who saw that she had everything she could want. Bribing her, I thought, with tasty morsels. Cassandra looked at the other guests as a little girl looks to her nurse, aching to be picked up and cuddled.
But no one touched Cassandra. No one spoke to her. Most people even looked around her, as if she were just a space.
“I'll go keep her company,” I said. “I'll speak with her.”
“No, don't, Callisto,” said Hector. “She'll answer.”
Into the great fires, maids tossed chips of wood heavy with dry sap so the fire sparkled and hissed. There was a trained bear and a tame leopard. There were jugglers of carved purple balls. Atop a great stone table, tiny girls danced, arching their backs as if they had no spines.
A bard carelessly set down his lyre within reach of Cassandra's fingers and the god-swept princess picked it up. Hector drew in his breath and went quickly to take the lyre away. “My holy sister,” he said softly, “give me the strings.”
She never looked at him. He did not want to take it by force, so he just stood helplessly.
I have heard lovely voices, but none to match Cassandra's. The notes flew from her fingers. Her voice twined like ivy around fifty princes and their wives, binding the hands of guards and freezing the step of a king.
The sound of joy has gone from the earth.
The altar loses the flame.
The wreath falls from the door.
Moonlight is broken like bones.
The bride of wrath slits every throat.
The storm of her coming is ten years of pain. Sing of the curse of Helen.
Helen blazed. She snatched the lyre from Cassandra's fingers, flung it to the floor and stomped on it, breaking the song forever.
Cassandra sang on, the terrifying song spilling like water from her lips.
Helen slapped Cassandra's ivory cheek.
The song stopped.
When she had her rage under control, Helen turned herself back into a swan. Gliding, she went to Priam and took the king's hands in hers. “Dear father, I ask as a new bride, still a stranger. I ask that this creature in her holy terror be removed from me. Lock this croaking gull in solitude. For the sound of joy is not broken. In fact, today, joy begins. For I bring glad tidings. I bear the child of Paris. In the spring I will honor your house with our son.”
The room burst into laughter and delight. Cups of wine were lifted and congratulations shouted. It was as if Helen had not just slapped a princess. Not just broken a cherished instrument as a jealous child breaks the toy of someone getting more attention.
Helen sailed on the sea of Troy's adoration.
The king made a sign to his guards to remove Cassandra.
His men were edgy and did not want to touch the mad princess. They wanted her to walk out of the hall by herself. They muttered at her, but Cassandra gave no sign that she heard.
Hector sighed. “Stay here, Andromache,” he said softly. “You also, Callisto.”
He moved through the crowd to take his sister's hand. He was so massive that the mountain of his heavy beard and the spread of his shoulders were visible even in this crowd of soldiers. He would not need a sword and spear to kill. He could crush a skull in his hands as I would crush the empty shell of a bird's egg.
And yet it was Cassandra the people feared.
Not I.
I was a
fraid of Helen.
AS DURING THE STORM the ship is wrecked and the surf tosses its broken wood onto the sand, so Pleis was a reminder of a ship that had sunk: the marriage of Helen to Menelaus.
I went in search of Pleis, but could not find him, so I went up thin stairs along a thick wall to see Cassandra instead.
There was no guard and the door of her tower swung open, banging in the wind. Perhaps this was her summer prison, and they had a winter prison for her elsewhere. Did she spin and weave like the rest of us? Dream of love? Hope for children?
I peeked in.
Like an ice princess under mounds of snow white fleece, Cassandra sat in the middle of a large carved bed. “I knew you would come. But I thought you would be here earlier.”
“Nobody wanted me to come.”
“I thought you did not worry about what everybody else wants.”
“I do worry. I worry mostly about Pleis.”
“He is safe today. He will be safe tomorrow.”
“How do you know these things?”
“Get under the fleece with me. It is too cold for you to stand there.”
“Where is your guard?”
“It was too cold for him to stand there either. I promised him I would not go anywhere.”
“If I were you, I would go.”
Cassandra regarded me thoughtfully. “Where?” she asked.
It was a good question. I could think of no place Cassandra could go.
“There is nowhere for you to go either,” she said. “Tell me your name, since I know it isn't Callisto.”
“Anaxandra. Most people get it wrong the first time.”
Cassandra raised her eyebrows.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “You don't get things wrong, do you?”
“I have everything wrong,” she said. “The gods in their supreme cruelty arranged my life so that those who love me do not trust me. Hector, the brother I adore, does not trust me. My honored father Priam does not, nor my dear mother Hecuba. But that is for me to bear. Let us talk of you. Anaxandra is a beautiful name. It suits you. Your father taught you to swim underwater,” said Cassandra.
I turned as cold as sleet. I could not bear being close to her. I wanted to fling off the covers and leap out of her reach, slam the door behind me and call the guard.
“You may do that,” said Cassandra. “Everyone else does.”
She is without friends, I thought. Truly the gods have cursed her.
“Truly the gods have cursed you,” Cassandra said to me.
“Me?”
“It is a shivery thing to steal the birthright of a princess. Do you think the gods will let you go unpunished? They are laughing even now. The gods will take away your greatest glory just when you think you are safe.”
I had no glory for a god to take. I thought it was mean of her to talk like that when I had come to be her friend. “Try to be pleasant,” I said, exactly like Andromache.
“Instead of truthful?” she said. “Why is it that we are so fearful of the truth? Why is it we always wish to talk of sewing and weaving instead?”
“I do think the tapestry you have on your loom is very beautiful,” I said.
“I was weaving a gift for my future husband, should such a person exist and dare make an offer to the king for a lunatic like me. But then I received knowledge of that man and I cannot bear it. I no longer weave.”
We sat for a long time. “Who will the husband be?” I whispered.
“Agamemnon. He will take me as loot, not as wife.”
I held her hand, which was very cold. “I met Agamemnon,” I told her. “He is frightening, but I thought he was just and kingly. Perhaps it won't be so bad.”
And then the earthquake came.
I have felt them several times in my life but one does not grow accustomed to the wrath of that god. When he stands beneath you and shoves up with his hands, throwing aside your tall columns and wide roofs as if they are nothing more than broken pottery—no, you do not get used to that.
A tiny table in Cassandra's cell danced across the floor. The poles of her hanging loom split. The roof fell in, opening her prison to the sky. The hand of the god even wrenched the bottom of her tower, trying to tear it off and fling it to the earth. I screamed but Cassandra was unmoved.
The quake ceased.
The city struggled for breath.
“No one has died,” said Cassandra. “But they will count heads and you do not want to be missing. You must not make Helen think of you.”
I got out of Cassandra's bed. I did not see how she could survive in this frigid place. “Why does Helen hate me?”
“How do you suppose it feels to be the most beautiful woman on earth, and your husband doesn't see or care? How do you suppose it feels when a little girl, filthy with sand and dried gore, gets more attention than you, his holy wife?”
Helen? Jealous of me? “You are wrong, Cassandra.”
The god kicked the world once more and the floor quivered. From nowhere came great clouds of dust. Some stones toppled. A baby wailed.
“Oh, Cassandra, I must find Pleis! I have to be sure he is all right! Where will I find him? Is that the kind of thing you know?”
“He is with the children of the princes. He is laughing. He thought the earthquake was a grand game. He loved how everything fell off the walls and splashed on the floor. Do not go near him. All that keeps you safe is that Helen and Paris have for a moment forgotten you.”
“He is my prince, Cassandra. How can I be neutral when my prince is unsafe?”
“You are not neutral,” said Cassandra. “It is not your nature.”
I almost asked about somebody else who wanted to be neutral. I almost asked whether the king of Lemnos would come back in the spring, and whether he would love me. But if Cassandra were to say that I should never see him again, I could not get through the winter.
Zeus sent a howling gale of snow and gloom. At night when the sun went down, the ice turned purple, like frozen wine. Our toes and fingers felt the same.
We did not see much of the men. They were shoveling away snow and rebuilding the roofs of Troy.
We girls spun donkey loads of wool. Hour after hour, day after day, we twirled the clay cups. To keep our minds off blue toes and chapped fingers, we went in circles telling stories. One day I described the keeping-track lines.
The princesses laughed so hard they dropped their spindles. Twisted threads of unplied yarn tangled over each other. “That's why you have clerks, Callisto,” said one of Priam's daughters. “It is not the work of a king to call out how many barrels of salted fish have been sold. Slaves exist to remember such things.”
The princesses were always happy to make ugly remarks about Menelaus and how poor a king he was. I listened for some time. “Keeping-track lines are very useful,” I said stiffly.
“How?” they wanted to know. “You make a keepingtrack line for a bushel of grain, but then you eat it. It's gone. What was the point of keeping track?”
“It prevents quarrels. You can store a fact in the clay. If two men fight about who owes money to whom, the clay proves who is right and who is wrong.”
“Deciding who is right and who is wrong is the task of a king,” said a princess I had liked until then. “Has Menelaus not even figured out what a king does? No wonder Helen left him for a better man.”
“If there is a war, Callisto,” said another princess, “you have proved that it will be over in a day. The warriors of Troy against a man who worries about counting his pottery? It will be a joke.”
“If you can call Menelaus a man. Couldn't keep Helen, could he?”
Andromache tried to change the subject. “I think Paris and Helen will have a son,” she said. “Helen is carrying the baby very high; that always means a boy.”
Nobody wanted it to be a girl. Girls are all right, in their place, but glory comes with sons, and Paris expected glory, Helen expected glory, King Priam and Queen Hecuba and every prince in Troy expected it.
But Helen already had a boy.
I checked on Pleis as often as I could. By night he slept in the tiny house of Paris and Helen. By day Kora, the pockmarked bear woman, carried him to the palace to abandon him among the royal children. I had bribed each of their nurses with the rest of my wasp-in-amber beads. They took the beads, but I did not know how much time they spent on the son of the enemy.
Rumor had reached us that Agamemnon and Menelaus were putting together a fleet. Battle fever rose and people were eager for the clash. The presence of Menelaus' little boy pleased no one.
“Helen is preparing the baby clothes,” said Andromache. “She certainly can weave like a queen. Have you seen the pattern she is doing for the baby blankets?”
No, but I had seen the clothes Pleis wore. The same he had worn on the Ophion.
“Have you been in their sweet little house yet? Queen Hecuba let Helen pick anything she wanted from the treasury to furnish it. She said Helen must have the best of everything.”
“Then why is that horrible old giantess Kora on Helen's staff ?”
There was a chorus of groans. “Nobody wants Kora around.”
“Nobody wants the little boy around either. A son of the enemy? They should have put him to death to start with.”
Day after day, snow blurred the horizon and the passage of time. Yet the days leaped forward and winter was flung aside.
The salt marsh filled with flowers. The willows by the Scamander River were laced with yellow buds. The wind was soft and the sky was warm and we had the first real news of ships from a port across the sea.
They said there were a thousand ships.
A thousand sheep, yes. But a thousand boats? It was a foolish rumor.
Then we heard that not one of those thousand ships could sail against Troy. There was not a whisper of wind on the sea. Menelaus could not go to war.
How Troy laughed.
But there are ways to bring a god to your side. They are done through the king, and the king of kings was not Menelaus, but Agamemnon his brother.
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