The Firebrand

CHAPTER 9

A little before daybreak Kassandra heard the jingling of bells and the sounds of movement in the city below. As she raised her head a wave of sickness rolled over her; it seemed to her that the quiet room was alive with shrieks and the clash of arms. Oh, no, she thought, falling back on her pillow, and pulling the blanket over her head. For a few minutes she lay unmoving - she had vowed that if there was to be catastrophe, it would happen when she was far from it. She had delivered the warning and that was quite enough.

But outside her room, the sounds of festival went on; soon they would come and call her, and at last she rose and dressed herself, and went to care for the temple serpents, half expecting that on a day of such evil omen she would find them all hiding inside their pots and holes; but they seemed to be behaving exactly as always. She fetched food from the kitchens and fed old Meliantha bread soaked in watered wine. When all had been done that she could find to do, she looked over the wall and saw hundreds of women streaming down from the gates of Troy and down to the fertile area between the rivers. She did not put on her holiday garment, nor stop to fashion a garland for herself; but she braided her dark hair loosely to keep it out of her eyes, then left the temple. On the path below she recognized before her a familiar figure and a head of reddish golden hair. She hurried to catch up with the woman.

"Oenone, what are you doing here? Are there no crops to be sown on Mount Ida, my sister?"

Encouraged by her words, Oenone smiled affectionately at Kassandra; but she did not speak, and after a moment Kassandra knew, as if the other woman had told her, she hoped for a glimpse of Paris. Kassandra could give her no encouragement or hope in this, so she lifted her hands to the chubby toddler riding on his mother's shoulder.

"How big he grows! Is he not heavy to ride on your shoulder this way?"

"His eyes are dark and he looks more and more like his father," Oenone said, not answering Kassandra's question. Indeed the boy's eyes, smoky blue at birth like all babies', had darkened to a glowing hazel not unlike Paris's or Kassandra's own.

Much good may that do him, Kassandra thought, so angry that she could hardly speak. Because she could not chide Oenone for this hopeless and absurd quest, she said crossly, "Go home, Oenone, tend to the crops on Mount Ida. Little good will come of this planting here. The gods are angry with Troy. Paris will not be here; this festival is for women - I should think you know our customs well enough by now to know that."

"Still I will come and pray with the others if there is need, to turn away the anger of Earth Mother," said Oenone, and Kassandra knew that nothing she said would make the slightest difference.

So she said, "Let me carry the baby for you," and held out her arms for the child. He was heavy indeed, but she had offered and would not withdraw her help. A pity Paris would not come and carry his own son, she thought. Among the women coming down from the palace she saw her mother, and Andromache with Hector's son Astyanax, now tall enough to walk at his mother's side, clutching to her skirt.

Creusa's baby, still small enough to be tied in her shawl, was slung over her shoulders; Polyxena led the group of Priam's daughters, all wearing the traditional beribboned festival tunic of maidens, their long curls floating in the breeze. They saw Kassandra and waved to her, and she did not feel churlish enough to refuse to return the greeting. If they would not postpone the festival or hold it quietly, in a way that would not attract the catastrophe she had foreseen, they might as well enjoy themselves while they could. Up the hill someone had started the first of the planting songs:

Bring the grain, by the winter hidden,

Bring it with songs and feasting and joy…

Other women took up the song. Kassandra heard Creusa's strong, sweet voice; then the other women took up the refrain, but when she tried to sing she felt choked, and her own voice would not carry.

"Look," said Oenone, pointing,"the men are on the wall watching us. There is your father, my precious," she said, pointing and trying to attract the attention of the child to where Paris stood in his bright armor, the pale early sunlight reflecting off it in arrow-like rays.

The child twisted in Kassandra's arms, trying to see what his mother was pointing at; he was heavy enough to throw Kassandra off balance, so that she nearly fell.

"I had better take him," said Oenone, and Kassandra did not protest. She could see the crimson plumes that surrounded Hector's helmet, Priam's brilliant armor, and Aeneas, taller than any of the other men.

They had now reached the fields; the ground had been prepared days before. The women stooped and took off their sandals, for no shod foot might tread the breasts of Earth Mother in this rite. Hecuba wore a scarlet robe; she raised her hands for the invocation, then paused and gestured to Andromache; the younger woman, in her brilliant scarlet gown from Colchis, came forward to take her place.

Kassandra understood; Hecuba was an old woman, and although she had borne seventeen children, of whom more than half had survived their fifth year - a splendid sign of Earth Mother's favour - she was now passing beyond the years of childbearing, and this rite must be performed by a fertile woman, a mother. For the last years it had not mattered so much, but now, when this year's grain was crucial to the survival of the city, no chance could be taken that a woman barren with age might affront Earth Mother by her presence in the greatest of rites.

Andromache gestured, and all maidens and virgins, as well as every woman who had never borne a living child, left the ploughed acres. Kassandra nodded farewell to Oenone and moved toward the small stone fences and grown-over hedges of thorn and rank bushes at the edge of the field. They were far from barren; she could hear concealed within them the sound of small insects, crickets and beetles, and many herbs and plants whose uses she was beginning to know grew at the margin of the ploughed fields. She observed a narrow leaf good for curing rashes on the skin of children and small animals; she stooped to cut it, murmuring a whispered prayer to the Goddess for this bounty even outside the lands given to her grace.

Now that the women were in the fields, the men were coming down; King Priam, the father of his people, in his richly dyed crimson loincloth, naked otherwise except for a string of purple stones round his neck, took the wooden plough between his hands and raised it high in the air; the cheer that went up was deafening. With his own hands he yoked a white donkey to the shafts of the plough; Kassandra knew that this animal had been chosen from all the beasts in Troy for the king's ploughing because it was without blemish and the owner had been highly paid.

Priam dug the ploughshare into the field, and again a cheer arose as the dark brown strip of fertile loam appeared between the pale sun-dried surface of the earth. The women's voices now lifted in a new song. When Kassandra was quite a little girl she had been told that the songs were to drown the cries of Mother Earth at being thus ravished. During her sojourn with the Amazons Kassandra had been taught a more sophisticated theory: that Earth Mother gave food to her children of her free will and the songs were only praise and thanksgiving; but even now she had to repress a shudder as the plough broke through the soil.

Now all the fertile women of the city burst on to the field; all together they stripped off their upper garments, exposing their breasts, and made symbolic gestures of stripping their milk into the waiting land, to nourish the fields. Over half of them were pregnant, from young girls just swelling with their first babies, their breasts no larger than green peaches, to women Hecuba's age who had borne a child every year or so for a generation, their long flabby breasts bared to the sky and sun.

Kassandra joined in the cry which rose to heaven:

"Earth Mother, nourish your children, we cry to you…'

The baskets of seed were passed to all the fertile women, and they began passing them down the field, scattering the grain. Priam was shoved in rude haste to the edge of the field; he stumbled and measured his length on the soil, staining his robe. There were gasps at this evil omen and he was picked up and borne off tenderly to where the rest of the men were surrounding the field now, watching the sowing. The sun was high, beating down with dazzling force.

"Maybe the Earth would bear no matter what we do or don't do," a big rough man Kassandra had never seen before suggested. "I been in heathen places where they know nothing of our Gods, and crops grow there, too, just the same as here."

"You be quiet, Ajax; we don't need any of your foolish ideas," said a strong deep voice Kassandra identified as Aeneas's.

"Whether it has to do with the Gods or not, this is the way things are done for decency and custom, and why not?"

Thunder rumbled in the distance; and clouds moved across the face of the sun. Kassandra felt the insects in the hedges grow silent. Then a few drops of rain rattled against the dry branches of the hedges, and within moments the flimsy garments of the women were flattened against their bodies. They sent up a cry:

"Thanks be to Earth Mother who sends rain to nourish us!"

The songs had quieted as the rain grew hard. Now the women finished sowing the last of the seed and everyone, including the little girls and the women who were old and barren, ran out on the field to assist in covering the last of the grain. Kassandra started to run and join Oenone when a dark surge came before her eyes and she paused, dizzy, not sure that the ground had not rocked beneath her feet.

There there was a war cry and she saw men in dark tunics rushing out on the field, shouting and yelling. A man in armor seized Oenone and, flinging her over his shoulder, rushed for the dark line of ships that had appeared while all eyes were on the ploughing and sowing.

By old custom, the Trojans had brought no weapons into the field; most of them were running for the city wall where they had left their weapons. Paris was one of the first to reappear on the wall, shooting arrow after arrow into the throng of strange soldiers. The man who held Oenone fell struggling, struck through the heart, and Oenone freed herself. There were many arrow and javelin shots, and many of the Akhaians fell; most of the others dropped the women they had seized and managed to reach the ships before the hailstorm of arrows cut them down. Oenone reached Hecuba's side and looked round for her child; finding him safe, she joined the small central knot of women around the Queen. Kassandra was still in the protection of the hedge. She saw Helen beside Oenone, and wondered what, if anything, Paris's two wives found to say to one another. She noted too, that Helen's shapely body was obviously swelling in pregnancy also.

She wondered if Menelaus had seen. If so, surely Menelaus would now rather go home and leave Helen to Paris—he would not keep fighting for the mother of some other man's child.

Kassandra, choosing her moment carefully, left the hedge and raced across the field, breathlessly crowding into the circle near the Queen, taking her place beside Oenone. All the women were looking down fearfully at the Akhaians nearing their ships. She picked out the tall beaked figure of Agamemnon; he was no monster now, only a man, rougher, stronger and crueller than most, but the sight of him still made her blood run cold.

Hecuba was looking around and counting her women. "Are you all here? Has anyone been taken?"

A group of women from the Sunlord's house were clustered together at the outskirts of Hecuba's women. Phyllida was unobtrusively counting them; she cried out, "Oh, where is Chryseis! Was she not with you, Kassandra? I thought I saw her at your side—"

"Yes, she was with me, perhaps she is still in the hedge. Shall I go back and see? All of - of them have got back to their ships, I think—"

"No," Phyllida said firmly, "you must not expose yourself; remember, you are Priam's daughter, and you would be a great prize to any one of the invaders. Stay here close to your mother," she admonished, as Hecuba came and grasped Kassandra's hand.

"So you are safe? I was worried about you," Hecuba said. "How did you know they would attack us?"

"I thought it likely," Kassandra said, "and so it was."

"But they have not taken any captives," Hecuba said, "and so they have had all their trouble for nothing."

"No, we did not come off untouched," Kassandra said. "They managed to take one of the maidens from Apollo's Temple."

"Oh, how dreadful!" Hecuba said with a gasp.

Kassandra thought to herself that the loss was a small one; the girl had been a troublemaker from the first, and it was not even certain that she was a maiden.

All the same, Kassandra was grateful that the attack had done so little harm. She decided to seek out Helen and ask when her child would be born - once again it seemed as if Helen was under the glamour of the Goddess, even at the most unattractive stage of pregnancy, she seemed beautiful and glowing. It was not only Paris whose eyes followed her as bits of lint follow amber.

Helen smiled at Kassandra with such intense welcome that Kassandra felt almost weak in the knees. The favour of the Goddess was to be treasured; without it, the women here might have torn the Spartan Queen to pieces; after all, she had brought the men of Troy into the dangers of this war. But I have no husband or lover for whom I must fear. Helen embraced her and Kassandra returned the greeting warmly.

Strange; when she first came here it was I who pleaded to my father and mother that they should have nothing to do with her. Now I love her well and if they sought to cast her out, I would be the first to speak in her favour. Is it the will of the Goddess she incarnates? Do I serve her in befriending Helen? No; now, bearing a child, she must seek the favour of Earth Mother.

"When is the baby due?"

"At autumn harvest," said Helen.

"And it is Paris's child? Then perhaps," Kassandra suggested, "Menelaus will go away and be content to leave you here."

Helen smiled cynically. "If he should say it, no one would listen," she said. "Come, Kassandra, you know as well as I that my body and my adultery are only a pretext for this war; Agamemnon has been trying for years to have a good excuse to attack Troy. If I sought to return to Menelaus tonight under cover of darkness, I would wager anything you like that my dead body would be found hanging on the walls and the Akhaians would keep fighting on the pretext of avenging me."

This was so likely true that Kassandra did not bother to comment. Helen said in annoyance, "There have been many times when I felt it would be best if I had been sworn a virgin to the Moon Maiden. Even now I am tempted to forswear men forever in her shrine; would she have me, do you think?"

"How should I know?" Kassandra replied hesitantly.

"Well, you are a priestess—"

"All I know is that she denies no woman who comes before her," Kassandra said. "But it seems to me that your destiny is to become a symbol of strife among men; and no one can argue with destiny."

"It would be too good to be true, I suppose, that I should be able to seek the Goddess and in her shadow avert the known pattern of my fate," Helen said. "But how do I know it is a God who has determined this fate and not that I have simply become entangled between two willful men who care nothing for the Gods?"

"I think this is the kind of thing no one can ever know," Kassandra said. "Yet I do feel the hand of some God in this; I know how Paris was driven to seek you."

"Then you mean that this war between Troy and my people was determined by the Immortals?" Helen asked. "Why? I mean, why me and not some other?"

"If I knew that," said Kassandra, "I should then be the most favoured seer of the Gods. I can only guess that the Goddess who favoured you with such beauty had this purpose in mind."

"And I still ask: why me and not some other?"

"Ask as much as you will," Kassandra said, "and if you receive an answer come and share it with me."