"So they were not quite as casual as they seemed about it," Phyllida said. She had not gone down into the camp, but she had heard all about it, and Kassandra could see it had lost nothing in the telling. "Look, they are performing rituals to purify the camp and appease the Sunlord."
"Well they might, if they scorn his curse," Kassandra said.
"I do not think it is the soldiers who scorn his curse," Phyllida said. "I think it is only Agamemnon himself; and we know already that he is a godless man."
"What are they about now?" Kassandra asked.
"They are building fires to cleanse the ground," Phyllida said, then shrank back at the great cry of mourning that rose from the Akhaians. They had dragged out a body from one of the tents, and were casting it on the flames.
It was too far to hear the words of the cries of despair, but they had heard such cries before. Phyllida gasped, "There is plague in their camp!"
And Kassandra said, in horror, "This, then, is the Sunlord's curse!"
Every morning and evening for ten days they watched plague victims being dragged out of the camp and their bodies burned; after the third day, the bodies were dragged a long way down the shore and burned there, for fear of contagion. Kassandra, who had seen the dirt and filth and disorder within the camp, was not surprised that there was sickness, though she did not even slightly belittle the Sunlord's curse, and she knew the Akhaians believed in it. At sunrise, at high noon and again at sunset, Khryse strode the battlements of Troy, wearing Apollo's mask and carrying his bow, and whenever he appeared there were cries and shrieks for mercy in the Akhaian camp.
Priam proclaimed that every Trojan soldier and citizen should appear before the priests of Apollo each morning, and that anyone who showed signs of illness should be confined alone to his own house. This isolated a few people with bad colds, and one or two men who had been undiscriminating about exploring the women's district. He also closed a filthy market and two or three brothels, but there were no signs, so far, of plague inside the walls of Troy. He declared a holiday for prayers and sacrifices to Apollo, imploring that they should continue to be spared the curse. However, when Khryse begged for audience and asked Priam also to request the return of Chryseis, he answered him sharply.
"You have called a God to your side, and if that is not enough, what more do you think a mortal man, even the King of Troy could do?"
"You mean you will do nothing to help me?"
"Why should it matter to me what becomes of your wretched daughter? I might have felt a fellow father's feeling had you asked three years ago when first she was taken, but you have not appealed to me before this; I cannot believe you are much in need of my help—except perhaps to boast that the King of Troy is your ally," Priam said.
Khryse said hotly, "If I called down Apollo's curse on the Argive camp, I can as easily curse Troy—"
Priam lifted his hand to stop him.
"No!" he thundered. "Not a word! Raise a finger or speak a syllable to curse Troy, and by Apollo's self, I swear I will myself have you flung into the Akhaian camp from the highest rampart of the city!"
"As Your Majesty wishes," Khryse said, bowed deeply and went away. Priam scowled, his feathers still ruffled.
"That man is too proud! Did you hear him—threatening to curse Troy itself!" He looked round to his counsellors and advisers in his throne room. "Should he ask audience again with me, make certain that I have no time to speak with him!"
Kassandra was not displeased with the interview. Still at the back of her mind was the old fear; once Khryse had offered to go to Priam and ask to marry her, and she had felt that her rather would be pleased to thrust her, even unwilling, into marriage - any marriage - and would find no reason for refusing an apparently respectable priest of Apollo. Now that she knew that Priam found Khryse almost as distasteful as she did herself, she breathed a sigh of relief.
CHAPTER 21
Ten days they watched the plague raging in the Akhaian camp. On the tenth day the soldiers dragged out a noble white horse and sacrificed it to Apollo, and some time later, a messenger with Apollo's serpent staff came up to the city, and asked for a truce for the purpose of speaking with Apollo's priests.
"A delegation will come down to the camp," they were told. Khryse of course was first among them; Kassandra did not ask if she might join the group; she simply slipped away to put on her ceremonial robes and went with them.
Agamemnon, Akhilles, and several of the other leaders, among whom Kassandra recognized Odysseus and Patroklos, were drawn up in ranks behind the priests of Apollo. The chief priest among the Akhaians, a lean, sinewy man who looked like an athlete, approached Khryse.
"It seems that the Immortal is angry with us, after all," he said, "but I ask you, colleague: will you accept some gift from us?"
Khryse said, "I want my daughter back, or properly married to the man who took her, to whom she went as an innocent maiden—"
Agamemnon snorted, but said nothing; he had apparently agreed to let the priests speak for him.
"It cannot be expected that the King of Mykenae would agree to marry a prisoner of war, when he already has a queen—" began the priest.
"Very well," said Khryse. "If he will not marry my daughter, I want her back, and a proper dowry with her, since she is no longer a virgin and I cannot find a husband for her without a dowry."
The priests conferred for a moment. Finally they said, "Suppose we were to offer you the pick of all the women from all the cities we have sacked in the countryside, maiden for maiden?"
"Do you think I am a lecher?" Khryse asked, his voice simmering with indignation. "I am a grieving father, and I call upon Apollo to right the wrong done me."
"Well, Agamemnon," said the Argive priest, "it seems that there is no alternative; we must act with simple justice, and restore the man's daughter."
Agamemnon stood up to his full height and folded his arms.
"Never! The girl is mine."
"But she isn't," said the priest. "You took her when there should have been a truce, at the spring-planting, and for that impiety the Earth Mother is displeased."
"No woman, even a Goddess, tells me what I may not do," contradicted Agamemnon. Kassandra noticed a visible shiver through the ranks of the men, and Odysseus in particular looked affronted.
"The Immortals," Odysseus said, "hate such pride as belongs only to them, Agamemnon. Come, give the girl back, or go into your own tents and pay the girl's father her lawful bride-price."
"If I give up the girl—" For the first time Agamemnon hesitated, noticing that his fellow chieftains were regarding him with anger. "If I give up the girl," he repeated, "why should all you others keep the prizes you have won, and laugh at me? You, Akhilles; if I am forced to give up mine, will you give up the woman in your tent?"
Akhilles snarled, "I was not fool enough to steal mine from a priest of Apollo, and bring us all under a curse, Agamemnon. My woman came to me because she liked me better than any of Priam's sons inside Troy. And since I came to Troy to please you, Agamemnon, when by right I should have been fighting at the side of my Trojan kinsfolk, I don't see why my woman should come into this at all. She is a good girl; she came to me of her free will, and she is skilled in all kinds of women's work. I had thought to take her home with me - should I ever return from this war—and make her my wife, since, unlike you, I did not have to marry some rotting old hag of a queen to get the rule of her city."