Hecuba said, her voice quavering, "Did you not see the Goddess take him?"
"That's what they said in the Akhaian ranks," said Hector, "and when I asked my own charioteer, he swore he saw Aphrodite stoop down from the walls and fling her cloak over Paris and snatch him away. As for me, I don't know what it was I saw; maybe just the blaze of the sun in my eyes. Where is Helen?"
"When the Goddess returned Paris here, she saw that he was bleeding," Andromache said, "and took him to her rooms to bandage his wound; by now they're probably in the bath."
"I don't doubt it a bit," Hector growled, "but I wish if Goddesses are going to interfere, they'd wait till things were properly settled. If the Goddess came herself to snatch Paris to safety, I wish she'd snatched Menelaus - and Helen too - all the way back to Sparta. If she's capable of the one - and notice, Immortals, I'm not impious to say she couldn't do it - she's capable of the other. Kassandra, what did you see? Are you going to tell me fairy-tales about the Goddess on the wall snatching him away?"
For a moment Kassandra was overjoyed; Hector appealed to her as if she were a trustworthy witness.
"Not a bit of it," she said. "But it looked to me as if Menelaus had some kind of vision; he stopped fighting and stared at the wall, and Paris ran for his life."
Hector sighed and said, "Well; it's too late for any more fighting today; but wait till this gets around. But of course if the Goddess intervened—even by giving Menelaus a vision - no one can blame Paris."
But he did not sound altogether convinced.
VOLUME THREE: Poseidon's Doom
CHAPTER 1
By twilight everyone in both armies, and most of the civilians in the city had heard the story, which of course did not grow less in the telling.
According to most of the eyewitnesses, the Goddess had appeared on the city wall and snatched Paris from under Menelaus's very sword, delivering him from a certain death-stroke; in one version Menelaus had sliced Paris in one stroke from chin to pelvis and the Goddess had healed him at a touch; she had bound up his wounds with nectar and ambrosia and transported him into Helen's very chamber.
Kassandra, when asked, replied only that she was not sure what she had seen; the sun had been in her eyes.
Privately she was certain that somehow the Goddess had intervened. But she was no longer certain quite how it had happened, although she was perfectly sure that, for a moment at least, Helen had worn the semblance of the Goddess. It would not be, after all, for the first time.
For two days the city talked of nothing but the duel, and the supposed intervention of the Gods. Hector and Aeneas came back from councils saying that the Akhaians were insisting that Menelaus had won the duel because Paris had fled, wounded.
"What did you answer them?" Priam asked eagerly.
"What do you think? We said that it was obvious that Paris had won, since the Gods themselves had intervened to save his life," Hector replied.
Kassandra, who had watched the battlefield from the walls most of the day, remembering her own arms-training and thinking that she could probably do as well as most of the Akhaian soldiers or any of the Trojans, asked, "What was that all about this afternoon? I saw two soldiers I did not know stand out for combat, and before they ever got to fighting, one of them started unarming and ended by stripping off his clothes down to his loincloth. Did they decide to wrestle instead of fighting with swords?"
Aeneas chuckled.
"Oh, no," he said. "Do you know Glaucus the Thracian?"
"I have spoken with him," Helen said. "He was the sailing-master of one of the ships which brought us here."
"Well, he stood out and challenged any Akhaian to give him a fight and Diomedes accepted. So they began calling out their lineage, in order to find out if they could meet honorably in single combat, and before they reached their great-grandfathers, they discovered they were cousins."
"So did they decide not to fight?" Kassandra asked.
"Didn't you see?" Aeneas asked.
"No; I was called away to the temple. One of the great serpents is about to shed her skin, and needed special care; they are blind at this time and cannot be handled by strangers," Kassandra said.
"They agreed they must fight for the honor of it; but they decided to exchange armor. Diomedes said that his ordinary armor was not handsome enough for an honorable gift, so he sent back to his ship for a precious set of silver armor with gold inlay, and then of course Glaucus had to trade round with his comrades for a fancy set to give him a gift of equal worth. They sounded like a couple of old men in the flea market haggling over the value of some trinket, and it went on and on—and of course they did the fighting in their old battered fighting armor, with the two fancy sets hanging up to be admired—"
"Who won?" asked Helen.
"I have no idea; I think they knocked each other down a time or two, and then it got too dark to see, so they embraced each other, thanked each other for the handsome gifts, and went off to dinner."
Hector chuckled. "No advantage, either way, I suppose, but it passed the afternoon. Of course we had nothing better to do anyway today—until the councillors on both sides have decided whether Paris or Menelaus won their duel, everything else is simply for amusement anyhow. Glaucus and Diomedes would have done better to make it a wrestling match - at least we could have had some bets on that one. I've been tempted to challenge Big Ajax to wrestle—he's the biggest man on the Akhaian line. I don't know if he can wrestle—"
"He can," said young Troilus. "He won the garland for wrestling at their sacrificial Games."
"Then I shall certainly challenge him," said Hector.
"Watch out you don't get an elbow in the face; his specialty is breaking teeth," Troilus said.
At dinner Hector asked Priam, "Sire, what will happen if the council decides that Menelaus won the duel?"
Priam shrugged.
"Nothing," he said, "The Akhaians will refuse to accept the decision and the war will go on. They don't want to settle; they're not going to give in till they break down the walls of Troy and sack the city."
"Why, you sound like Kassandra, Father."
"No," said Priam, "I know what Kassandra thinks." But for, once, as Kassandra raised her eyes, struck again by that terrible fear, and the actual sight of Troy in flames which came between her and the living world, Priam smiled at her, kindly, as if to try and dispel her fears. "I have heard her say it often enough that she believes that they will destroy us. But that is not true."
"Can they break the walls of Troy, Father?" Paris asked.
"Not unless they can persuade Poseidon to help them with an earthquake," Priam stated.
Now Kassandra felt it through all her body; the walls would fall to the wrath of Poseidon, his earthquake—she should have known all along that no ordinary efforts of men could break the walls of Troy; only a God could tear down the great high citadel.
"Then we should sacrifice to Poseidon as soon as possible," Hector said, "for he is the only God who can help us."
"Yes," Kassandra said quickly, "let us make sacrifices at once to Poseidon and beseech him to aid us in our cause! Is he not one of the guardian Gods of Troy?" Not knowing what she was going to say until she heard it flooding through her mind like a scream of anguish, she said: 'Paris! You - oh, beware the earthquake! Sacrifice to Poseidon! Make him pledges, for it is you he will destroy - destroy - destroy
She stopped herself by main force, actually clamping her hands across her lips. Priam scowled at her in anger and disgust.