“Yes, I know,” she said. “Looks awful, doesn’t it?”
I was puzzled, until I realized she was referring to the rope burns on her wrists.
“People seem to think I was dragged kicking and screaming to Agamemnon’s bed, but it wasn’t like that at all.” She fixed her startling yellow eyes on me. “I went willingly. Because I knew the sooner it happened, the sooner he’d be dead.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“No, I couldn’t, they gagged me. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. Nobody ever believes me.” Her hands were busy arranging sweetmeats on a plate. After finishing the display to her satisfaction, she looked up. “His wife kills us, you know.”
“Is that right?”
“I mean, she has every reason…You can’t blame her. You know what he did?”
I started to say “Yes,” but Cassandra ignored me and swept on.
“He sacrificed their daughter. It was a trap. He told her mother the girl was going to be married to Achilles and you know that would have been a brilliant match, so they all ran around making dresses and then they went to the camp at Aulis. She was sacrificed on the altar of Artemis to get the fleet a fair wind for Troy.” She smiled, and for a moment I saw a resemblance to Hecuba. “I’d murder the bastard, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, I’m glad we agree. I knew we would.”
I’d never met anybody like Cassandra, that curious mixture of the childlike—almost retarded, it seemed, at times—and the chilling. I wasn’t sure how to respond.
She offered me the plate of sweetmeats. “Try one of those, they’re really good.”
I took one and then we sat back in our chairs, mouths full of a gooey mixture that made talking almost impossible. When she finally managed to un-clag her jaws, she said: “I believe my family has reason to be grateful to you?”
I just shook my head.
“You tried to bury my father?”
“Not me, that was Amina,” I said, flatly. “She paid the price for it too.” I had no desire to be thanked for an action I’d merely blundered into.
We went on chatting while she mixed the wine. There was something odd about this occasion and it took me a while to work out what it was. Cassandra seemed to have no recollection of our previous meeting. Perhaps it was the nature of the frenzy that she couldn’t recall anything she’d said or done during one of her “episodes”—or she may have remembered very well, but chose not to speak of it.
She handed me a cup of wine. “I expect you’ve been to see my mother?”
“Yes, several times.” It would have been natural at this point for her to ask how her mother was, but she didn’t. I said, hesitantly, “I’m sure she’d love to see you.”
“I’m sure she would.”
“Well, then, why—?”
“I don’t think so. I will go, I won’t let her leave without saying goodbye—but not just yet.”
“Why is it so difficult?”
I didn’t expect her to answer—in fact, I regretted asking the question almost before the words were out of my mouth—so I was surprised when she plunged straight in. “It wasn’t, to begin with. Not till Helen—that’s when it really started to go wrong. You know, I watched them drive through the gates, Paris and Helen. I saw my father welcome her and I knew, I knew what was going to happen. It wasn’t a vague premonition or anything like that—I saw Troy in flames. So, I clawed her face. I thought if I could stop her being beautiful, even just for a few days, Paris would come to his senses—and my father and everybody else—and they’d send her back to her husband where she belonged. Instead of that, I got sent away—that’s when it all began. Apparently, I attacked anybody who came near me, my mother came and tried to calm me down—and I attacked her too. So they locked me up. They had to force food down me, I didn’t want to eat, I didn’t want great big wobbly fat tits like Helen. I had women to look after me—guards really, but they weren’t allowed to hit me. Didn’t need to—Hecuba did that. With a hairbrush. I used to think she hated me—because I was the one stain on her perfect family.
“I got better, but by the time I went home everything, everything, revolved around Helen. Paris was besotted—Hector not much better—even my father! She could play him like a flute. There was some talk of marrying me off; I think they actually had some poor sucker lined up, but then it happened again. And again. And by this time, it was obvious nobody was going to marry me. Even being King Priam’s son-in-law couldn’t make up for the taint of madness. Who wants that in the family? So Hecuba decided I was going to be a priestess—a virgin priestess. Priam went along with it—he went along with almost everything she said—and I was packed off to the temple.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen.”
“You must have missed your family?”
“Not really. I certainly didn’t miss my mother! I did miss my father, and Helenus. But, of course, from Hecuba’s point of view—problem solved. Now, when I had fits of madness, she could say it was a frenzy sent by the god. Much more respectable. If I’d been religious, it might have made things easier, but I wasn’t—not then, anyway. You must know the story? How Apollo kissed me and gave me the gift of prophecy, and then when I refused to sleep with him, spat in my mouth to make sure I’d never be believed?”
“I’ve heard the story. Is it true?”
“Of course it’s true.”
I was starting to rebel against being the audience for an endless, self-justifying monologue. “I’m not even sure I know what prophecy is.”
“Well, take a very minor example…I haven’t moved from this chair since I got up, I certainly haven’t looked out of the door, but I saw you walking along the beach and I knew you were coming here.”
“Hmm.”
“You don’t sound convinced?”
“We-ell, I came to ask you a question—and I knew the answer before I arrived. Is that prophecy?”
“No, that’s just intelligence.” She was looking intently at me, really seeing me, I thought, for the first time. “You watch people, don’t you?”
“Look, she’s your mother. You’ve just got married—would it be so difficult to walk a few hundred yards?”
“You have no idea how difficult.”
I was beginning to glimpse the truth about Cassandra. Like Athena, who’d sprung fully armed from Zeus’s head, she didn’t owe her life to anything that had gone on between a woman’s legs. So, Hecuba could be brushed aside as an irrelevance. She was—at least in that way—the opposite of me.
Anyway, I had my answer. I put my cup down—I’d barely touched the wine—and was about to stand up when there was a knock on the door.
Cassandra put a restraining hand on my arm. “Don’t go yet. That’ll be Calchas—and he’ll want to talk to you as much as me.”
I could hear the maid at the door letting him in. “I can’t think what he’d want to talk to me about.”
“Can’t you? Clever girl like you—I’d have thought it was obvious by now.”
As Calchas came into the room, I smelled salt air on his skin, together with the rather less pleasant smell of the white paste he’d plastered onto his face. He was wearing a priest’s robes and carried a staff festooned with scarlet bands. A compliment to Cassandra’s new role as Agamemnon’s wife? Or a visible reminder of their shared priesthood? They’d trained in the same temple, even slept in the same small room, though many years apart—Calchas must have been easily fifteen years older. Still, they had that experience in common. After he’d sat down and been given wine, they started reminiscing about the priest who’d trained them both, and then—with considerably more affection, I thought—about the ravens who’d been kept in the temple grounds, unable to fly away because their wing feathers had been clipped. These birds had been their childhood companions, their friends—and they’d been the same birds. Ravens live a long time in captivity. They all had a name, a personality, little tricks that they did. As I listened, a picture took shape in my mind of two very lonely children, each of them sent away from home before they were ready to leave. There was something incredibly moving about this—and it changed my attitude to both of them, but particularly to Calchas, whom I’d always thought a bit of a fraud. I wasn’t so sure about that now.