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 anything 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, the fourth 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 jewellery 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 jewellery, 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 should 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; even now, her mother insisted that she was old enough to stay inside the women's quarters instead of wandering all over the palace. As for going about alone into the city, her mother seemed horrified and frightened by the very idea. Kassandra hated this but she was obedient; she allowed her mother's old nurse to teach her to spin and weave tapestry. She still cherished her clay doll and, with the help of her father's unmarried sister, Hesione, let herself be coaxed into spinning the thread and weaving a robe for her doll. She hated the drudgery which made her fingers ache, but she was proud of it 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. She obeyed the seemingly senseless rules her mother and Hesione gave her (mostly that she must stay indoors and ignore all the interesting things which might be happening in the palace or the city). But there were still days when Kassandra tried hard 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 the ships she had seen the day the God spoke to her, but now she knew they were from the country to the south, the island kingdoms of the Akhaians and of Crete. They came for trade with the Hyperborean countries at the far side of the North Wind; 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 God-Bulls 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 ever known, ran through her body…
She was lying in the corner of 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 Apollo's sun gleamed down into her face. 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 for 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 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, shaking with terror, the ships lying 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 boards 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 inward 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 of the holy mountain, Ida, rose. 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.