The Firebrand

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  “Welcome, Lady,” said one of them, “and the little princess too. Would you like to sit here and rest for a moment until the priestess can speak with you?”

  The Queen and the princess were shown to a marble bench in the shade. Kassandra sat quietly beside her mother for a moment, glad to be out of the heat; she finished her melon and wiped her hands on her underskirt, then looked about for a place to put the rind; it did not seem quite right to throw it on the floor under the eyes of the priests and priestesses. She slid down from the bench and discovered a basket where there was a quantity of fruit rinds and peelings, and put her rind inside it with the others.

  Then she walked around the room slowly, wondering what she would see, and how different the house of a God would be from the house of a King. This, of course, was only His reception room, where people waited for audience; there was a room like this in the palace where petitioners came to wait when they wanted to ask a favor of the King or bring him a present. She wondered if He had a bedroom or where He slept or bathed. And Kassandra peered through into the main room which, she thought, must be the God’s audience chamber.

  He was there. The colors in which He was painted were so lifelike that Kassandra was not really aware for a moment that what she was seeing was a statue. It seemed reasonable that a God should be a little larger than life, rigidly upright, smiling a distant but welcoming smile. Kassandra stole into the room, to the very foot of the God, and for a moment she thought she had actually heard Him speak; then she knew it was only a voice in her mind.

  “Kassandra,” He said, and it seemed perfectly natural that a God should know her name without being told, “will you be My priestess?”

  She whispered, neither knowing nor caring if she spoke aloud, “Do you want me, Lord Apollo?”

  “Yes; it is I who called you here,” he said. The voice was great and golden, just what she imagined that a God’s voice would be; and she had been told that the Sun Lord was also the God of music and song.

  “But I am only a little girl, not yet old enough to leave my father’s house,” she whispered.

  “Still, I bid you remember, when that day comes, that you are Mine,” said the voice, and for a moment the motes of golden dust in the slanting sunshine became all one great ray of light through which it seemed that the God reached down to her and touched her with a burning touch . . . and then the brightness was gone and she could see that it was only a statue, chill and unmoving and not at all like the Apollo who had spoken to her. The priestess had come to lead her mother forward to the statue, but Kassandra tugged at her mother’s hand.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered insistently. “The God told me He would give you what you asked for.”

  She had no idea when she had heard this; she simply knew that her mother’s child was a boy, and if she knew when she had not known before, then it must have been the God who told her, and so, though she had not heard the God’s voice, she knew that what she said was true.

  Hecuba looked down at her skeptically, let her hand go and went into the inner room with the priestess. Kassandra went to look around the room.

  Beside the altar was a small reed basket, and inside, as Kassandra peeped in, a suggestion of movement. At first she thought it was kittens, and wondered why, for cats were not sacrificed to the Gods. Looking more closely, she noted that there were two small coiled snakes in the basket. Serpents, she knew, belonged to Apollo of the Underworld. Without stopping to think, she reached out and grasped them in either hand, bringing them toward her face. They felt soft and warm and dry, faintly scaly beneath her fingers, and she could not resist kissing them. She felt strangely elated and just faintly sick, her small body trembling all over.

  She never knew how long she crouched there, holding the serpents, nor could she have said what they told her; she only knew that she was listening attentively to them all that time.

  Then she heard her mother’s voice in a cry of dread and reproof. She looked up, smiling.

  “It’s all right,” she said, looking past her mother to the troubled face of the priestess behind Hecuba. “The God told me I might.”

  “Put them down, quickly,” said the priestess. “You are not used to handling them; they might very well have bitten you.”

  Kassandra gave each of the serpents a final caress and laid it gently back in the reed basket. It seemed to her that they were reluctant to leave her, and she bent close and promised them she would come again and play with them.

  “You wretched, disobedient girl!” Hecuba cried as she rose, grabbing her by the arm and pinching her hard, and Kassandra drew away, troubled; she could not remember that her mother had ever been angry with her before this, and she could not imagine why she should make a fuss about something like this.

  “Don’t you know that snakes are poisonous and dangerous?”

  “But they belong to the God,” Kassandra argued. “He would not let them bite me.”

  “You were very lucky,” said the priestess gravely.

  “You handle them, and you are not afraid,” Kassandra said.

  “But I am a priestess and I have been taught to handle them.”

  “Apollo said I was to be His priestess, and He told me I might touch them,” she argued, and the priestess looked down at her with a frown.

  “Is this true, child?”

  “Of course it is not true,” Hecuba said sharply. “She is making up a tale! She is always imagining things.”

  This was so unfair and unjustified that Kassandra began to cry. Her mother grabbed her firmly by the arm and pulled her outside, pushing her ahead and down the steep steps so roughly that she stumbled and almost fell. The day seemed to have lost all its golden brilliance. The God was gone; she could no longer feel His presence, and she could have cried for that even more than for the bruising grip of her mother on her upper arm.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Hecuba scolded again. “Are you such a baby that I cannot leave you alone for twenty minutes without your getting into mischief? Playing with the Temple serpents—don’t you know how badly they could have hurt you?”

  “But the God said He would not let them hurt me,” Kassandra declared stubbornly, and her mother pinched her again, leaving a bruise on her arm.

  “You must not say such a thing!”

  “But it is true,” the girl insisted.

  “Nonsense; if you ever say such a thing again,” said her mother crossly, “I shall beat you.” Kassandra was silent. What had happened had happened; she had no wish to be beaten, but she knew the truth and could not deny it. Why couldn’t her mother trust her? She always told the truth.

  She could not bear it, that her mother and the priestess should think she was lying, and as she went quietly, no longer protesting, down the long steps, her hand tucked tightly in the larger hand of the Queen, she clung to the face of Apollo, His gentle voice in her mind. Without her even being aware of it, something very deep within her was already waiting for the sound.

  4

  AT THE NEXT full moon, Hecuba was delivered of a son, who was to be her last child. They named him Troilus. Kassandra, standing by her mother’s bed in the birth chamber, looking on the face of her small brother, was not surprised. But when she reminded her mother that she had known since the day of her visit to the Temple that the child would be a son, Hecuba sounded displeased.

  “Why, so you did,” she said angrily, “but do you really think a God spoke to you? You are only trying to make yourself important,” she scolded, “and I will not listen to it. You are not so little as that. That is a babyish thing to do.”

  But that, Kassandra thought angrily, was the important thing: she had known; the God had spoken to her. Did He speak to babies, then? And why should it make her mother angry? She knew the Goddess spoke to her mother; she had seen the Lady descend on Hecuba when she invoked Her at harvest time and in blessing.

  “Listen, Kassandra,” said the Queen seriously, “the greatest crime is to speak anyth
ing but the truth about a God. Apollo is Lord of the Truth; if you speak His name falsely, He will punish you, and His anger is terrible.”

  “But I am telling the truth; the God did speak to me,” Kassandra said earnestly, and her mother sighed in despair, for this was not an unknown thing either.

  “Well, I suppose you must be left to Him, then. But I warn you, don’t speak of this to anyone else.”

  Now that there was another prince in the palace, another son of Priam by his Queen, there was rejoicing through the city. Kassandra was left very much to herself, and she wondered why a prince should be so much more important than a princess. It was no use asking her mother why this should be so. She might have asked her older sister, but Polyxena seemed to care for nothing except gossip with the waiting-women about pretty clothes and jewelry and marriages. This seemed dull to Kassandra, but they assured her that when she was older she would be more interested in the important things of a woman’s life. She wondered why these should be so important. She was willing enough to look at pretty clothes and jewelry, but had no desire to wear them herself; she would as soon see them on Polyxena or her mother. Her mother’s waiting-women thought her as strange as she thought them. Once she had stubbornly refused to enter a room, crying out, “The ceiling will fall!” Three days later, there was a small earthquake and it did fall.

  AS TIME PASSED and season followed season, Troilus began first to toddle and then to walk and talk; sooner than Kassandra thought possible, he was almost as tall as she was herself. Meanwhile, Polyxena grew taller than Hecuba and was initiated into the women’s Mysteries.

  Kassandra longed fiercely for the time when she too would be recognized as a woman, though she could not see that it made Polyxena any wiser. When she had been initiated into the Mysteries, would the God speak again to her? All these years she had never again heard His voice; perhaps her mother was right and she had only imagined it. She longed to hear that voice again, if only to reassure herself it had been real. Yet her longing was tempered with reluctance; to be a woman, it seemed, was to change so irrevocably as to lose all that made her herself. Polyxena was now tied to the life of the women’s quarters, and seemed quite content to be so; she no longer even seemed to resent the loss of her freedom, and would no longer conspire with Kassandra to run away down into the city.

  Soon enough, Troilus was old enough to be sent to the men’s quarters to sleep, and she herself was twelve years old. That year she grew taller, and from certain changes in her body she knew that soon she too would be counted among the women of the palace and no longer allowed to run about where she chose.

  Obediently, Kassandra allowed her mother’s old nurse to teach her to spin and weave. With the help of Hesione, her father’s unmarried sister, she let herself be coaxed into spinning the thread and weaving a robe for her clay doll, which she still cherished. She hated the drudgery, which made her fingers ache, but she was proud of her work when it was done.

  She now occupied a room in the women’s quarters with Polyxena, who was sixteen and old enough to be married, and Hesione, a lively young woman in her twenties, with Priam’s curling dark hair and brilliant green eyes. Under the seemingly senseless rules of conduct set forth by her mother and Hesione, Kassandra was to stay indoors and ignore all the interesting things that might be happening in the palace or the city. But there were days when she managed to evade the vigilance of the women, when she would run off alone to one of her secret places.

  One morning she slipped out of the palace and took the route through the streets that led upward to Apollo’s Temple.

  She had no desire to climb to the Temple itself, no sense that the God had summoned her. She told herself that when that day came, she would know. As she climbed, halfway up she turned to look down into the harbor, and saw the ships. They were just as she had seen them the day the God spoke to her; but now she knew that they were ships from the South, from the island kingdoms of the Akhaians and of Crete. They had come to trade with the Hyperborean countries, and Kassandra thought, with an excitement that was almost physical, that they would reach the country of the North Wind, from whose breath were born the great Bull-Gods of Crete. She wished she might sail north with the ships; but she could never go. Women were never allowed to sail on any of the great trading ships, which, as they sailed up through the straits, must pay tribute to King Priam and to Troy. And as she stared at the ships, a shudder, unlike any physical sensation she had known before, ran through her body. . . .

  She was lying in a corner on a ship, lifting up and down to the motion of the waves; nauseated, sick, exhausted and terrified, bruised and sore; yet when she looked up at the sky above the great sun-shimmering sail, the sky was blue and gleaming with Apollo’s sun. A man’s face looked down at her with a fierce, hateful, triumphant smile. In one moment of terror, it was printed forever on her mind. Kassandra had never in her life known real fear or real shame, only momentary embarrassment at a mild reproof from her mother or father; now she knew the ultimate of both. With one part of her mind she knew she had never seen this man, yet knew that never in her life would she forget his face, with its great hook of a nose like the beak of some rapacious bird of prey, the eyes gleaming like a hawk’s, the cruel fierce smile and the harsh jutting chin; a black-bearded countenance which filled her with dread and terror.

  In a moment between a breath and a breath, it was gone, and she was standing on the steps, the ships distant in the harbor below her. Yet a moment ago, she knew, she had been lying in one of those ships, a captive—the hard deck under her body, the salt wind over her, the flapping sound of the sail and the creaking of the wooden boards of the ship. She felt again the terror and the curious exhilaration which she could not understand.

  She had at the moment no way of knowing what had happened to her, or why. She turned around and looked upward to where the Temple of Pallas Athene rose white and high above the harbor, and prayed to the Maiden Goddess that what she had seen and felt was no more than some kind of waking nightmare. Or would it truly happen one day . . . that she would be that bruised captive in the ship, prey of that fierce hawk-faced man? He did not resemble any Trojan she had ever seen. . . .

  Deliberately putting away the frozen horror of her—nightmare? vision?—Kassandra turned away and looked inland, to where the great height rose of the holy Mount Ida. Somewhere on the slopes of that mountain . . . no, she had dreamed it, had never set foot on the slopes of Ida. High above were the never-melting snows, and below, the green pasturelands where, she had been told, her father’s many flocks and herds grazed in the care of shepherds. She rubbed her hands fretfully over her eyes. If she could only see what lay there beyond her sight . . .

  Not even years later, when all things which had to do with prophecy and the Sight were second nature to her, was Kassandra ever sure whence came the sudden knowledge of what she must do next. She never claimed or thought she had heard the voice of the God; that she would have known and recognized at once. It was simply there, a part of her being. She turned round and ran quickly back to the palace. Passing through a street she knew, she glanced almost wistfully at the fountain; no, the water was not still enough for that.

  In the outer court, she spied one of her mother’s women, and hid behind a statue, fearing that the woman might have been sent to search for her. There was always a fuss now whenever she went outside the women’s quarters.

  Such folly! Staying inside did not help Hesione, she thought, and did not know what she meant by it. Thinking of Hesione filled her with a sudden dread, and she did not know why, but it occurred to her that she should warn her. Warn her? Of what? Why? No, it would be no use. What must come will come. Something within her made her wish to run to Hesione (or to her mother, or to Polyxena, or to her nurse, anyone who could ease this nameless terror which made her knees tremble and her stomach wobble). But whatever her own mission might be, it was more urgent to her than any fancied or foreseen dangers to anyone else. She was still crouched, hiding, behi
nd the pillar; but the woman was out of sight. I was afraid that she would see me.

  Afraid? No! I have not known the meaning of the word! After the terror of that vision in the harbor, Kassandra knew that nothing less would ever make her feel fear. Still she did not wish to be seen with this compulsion upon her; someone might stop her from doing what must be done. She hurried to the women’s quarters and found a clay bowl which she filled with water drawn fresh from the cistern, and knelt before it.

  Staring into the water, at first she saw only her own face looking back, as from a mirror. Then as the shadows shifted on the surface of the water, she knew it was a boy’s face she looked on, very like her own: the same heavy straight dark hair, the same deep-set eyes, shadowed beneath long heavy lashes. He looked beyond her, staring at something she could not see. . . .

  Troubled with care for the sheep, each one’s name known, each footstep placed with such care; the inner knowledge of where they were and what must be done for each of them, as if directed by some secret wisdom. Kassandra found herself wishing passionately that she could be trusted with work as responsible and meaningful as this. For some time she knelt by the basin, wondering why she had been brought to see him and what it could possibly mean. She was not aware that she was cramped and cold, nor that her knees ached from her unmoving posture; she watched with him, sharing his annoyance when one of the animals stumbled, sharing his pleasure at the sunlight, her mind just touching and skimming over the occasional fears—of wolves, or larger and more dangerous beasts . . . she was the strange boy whose face was her own reflection. Lost in this passionate identification, she was roused by a sudden outcry.

  “Hai! Help, ho, fire, murder, rape! Help!” For a moment she thought it was he who had cried out; but no, it was somehow a different kind of sound, heard with her physical ears; it jarred her out of her trance.

  Another vision, but this one with neither pain nor fear. Do they come from a God? She returned with a painful jolt to awareness of where she was: in the courtyard of the women’s quarters.