Goddess of Yesterday (21 page)

She seemed to have trouble herself, thinking of a bald head, and I understood. It was kind of her to say I had suffered a fever and been shaved to let the heat out. She certainly knew it was more likely that I had been prepared for some great shame, like slavery.

I wondered how long I would be treated as a princess.
Why had Helen not given King Priam instructions to enslave me right away?

I rewound the turban.

Once my head was covered, Andromache became cheerful again. “Now I will show you Troy. We will run on the battlements and visit Cassandra and stop by the weaving room and of course—” A dimple poked in one cheek and she shot me a marvelous smile. “And of course, we'll end up wherever Hector is. I'm not allowed to visit Hector that often. The king says it's forward. But you're with me. You'll be my chaperone. Now, don't be afraid of Hector. He's easy to be afraid of; he's sort of like the handle of an ax, don't you think, or maybe the blade, but actually he's just a puppy.”

I collapsed in giggles. “I have never seen anybody in love before,” I said. “I love love. Another princess and I, long ago, used to talk about falling in love. And you've done it.”

Her laugh spilled around me like water from a fountain. “Helen fell in love,” she pointed out. “Paris fell in love. You watched them, Callisto.”

In my heart, I introduced myself properly. My name is Anaxandra, I wanted to tell Andromache. No, not
Alex
andra.
Anax
andra. Most people get it wrong the first time.

I did not think Andromache would get it wrong. I was dizzy with the desire to tell her the truth. But truth of another sort leaped out of me. “Helen loves only herself,” I said. “I agree with that princess on the tower. Helen inside your gates is danger inside your gates.”

The sparkle went out of her dark eyes and she looked away.

I had torn the fragile fabric of a new friendship. Helen was their bride—their new sister—their new daughter. I should not have said a word against her.

It dawned on me why Helen had not destroyed me today. She entered Troy as beauty: all beauty, wholly beauty. To whip or enslave a princess, while common in war, is not an act of beauty. Helen did not want Priam to witness her as a hard woman. Not yet.

“Show me what you embroidered on your voyage, Callisto!” cried Andromache. “Is
this
what you were working on during the long days at sea? Oh, Callisto, it's simply beautiful! You are
so
good with a needle. You
must
show me how to make this stitch. It looks like a star.”

I was not holding anything. I had not had needlework on the long voyage, only a lap full of salt water or Pleis. Andromache put her own needlework into my hands.

“This,” said Andromache, folding the needlework over so it could not be seen, and lifting her eyes and chin in a gesture toward the door, “is one of our serving women, Kora. Kora, this is the new princess, Callisto, who comes to us from Siphnos.”

Kora was a bear of a woman with pocked skin and fingers like sausages. She could have been twin sister to Hector, she was that big. Her nose was squashed and her lips puckered inward. She had lost her teeth.

“Kora often has the honor,” said Andromache brightly, “of tending Prince Paris. No doubt she will now assist the Lady Helen.”

I could imagine Kora in the slaughterhouse, cutting up a lamb. I could not imagine her tending a prince or a princess in the bath.

Andromache held my eyes until I grasped the manner in which Kora tended Paris.

Much as a prince might wish for it, walls do not have ears. If a prince—Paris, say—needs to listen in on the conversations
of others, he must send someone. Kora would take up as much space in a hall as three pillars. Yet I thought this ugly pudding of a woman would arouse no more notice than that, either.

“You were about to tell me about Cassandra,” I said to Andromache.

“Oh, poor Cassandra. She and I used to weave together, but the gods blew breezes through her mind. Now she swears at the people and screams at the gods and beats her head against the wall. Cassandra isn't supposed to have visitors and she isn't supposed to leave the tower. Of course, nobody pays any attention, especially me. I go up to gossip and bring her more embroidery floss, and sometimes we play ball on the parapet and now and then we go to the temple together. I will take you to the temple in the morning, Callisto. The Palladium is very dear to my heart.”

I was not sure I really wanted to see the Palladium.

Andromache nodded. “It is frightening,” she agreed. “Hector's grandmother was one of the women who saw it come down from the heavens. She thought it was a shooting star, but it got brighter and closer. Do you know it actually screamed with pain when it entered the world? It was Athena herself, and she left us her image. The image is attended by many priestesses and acolytes. The temple is the highest place in Troy. Beneath it are the treasuries, connected by tunnels, and far, far below are springs of cold water, and even deeper are the shelves where the acolytes sleep. They're never allowed out in the sun, you know, once they have given themselves to the goddess. They'd be killed if they were seen.”

Andromache took my hand. She moved like a spindle whorl, twisting faster than the eye could see, and I whirled after her, and we toured Troy like two little gusts of wind.

The city was almost entirely roofed. Polished pillars and long colonnades lined streets as narrow as threads. Houses were stacked haphazardly upon and against one another. The stairs were not long fine stretches, but steep uneven steps thrown against a wall here, spouting up inside a room there. Floors followed the tilt of the hill, some floors as steep as a goat path and others with a step in the middle.

We came suddenly upon the main avenue. Its cobblestones were shiny brown in the sun. It was a dramatic road, stretching from the Gate of the Horse up to the palace, swinging right and then stepping up to the Palladium. I shuddered, thinking of acolytes in the cold wet dark, kneeling before a goddess who had thrown herself out of heaven.

“The palace has enough bedrooms for all fifty sons,” said Andromache, “and on an upper floor, for the twelve daughters. But of course some sons have gotten married and they have children of their own and their wives insisted on moving out. People sleep in every corner of the palace by night, and by day they explode into the halls like the seeds of a flower when you shake it in the wind. Now this palace in front of us belongs to Deiphobus. He's everybody's favorite brother.”

She pulled me down a narrow lane paved in beach pebbles to another house. Its walls were whitewashed, shutters painted blue and yellow. From behind a wall a sycamore spread its branches. “Hector's mansion,” she whispered, as if it were a secret. We admired her future home. A huge tangled stork's nest covered the roof. It is a good thing to be greeted every year by a stork. She would have a good marriage.

We whirled on until we came to the house of Paris. “It isn't ready yet,” Andromache told me. “The paint's still wet.”

It looked very small. “How many rooms does it have?”

“A fine hall, an inner chamber and a courtyard full of flowers.”

Helen had given up the great palace of Amyklai for two rooms and a bit of sun on stone. I wondered where Pleis would sleep.

“Now,
this
mansion belongs to a general who is
not
a son of Priam. He has to introduce himself that way. ‘I'm not one,’ he says. Here, dash up these stairs with me. Cassandra will be so glad to have company. She'll be desperate for everything we can tell her.”

I was puzzled. “I thought she knew everything already.”

“She can see the future,” explained Andromache, “but the present confuses her. And she's so lonely, it doesn't matter if you talk about things she already knows. She just wants you to come. She likes me because I talk so much. I try not to. Hector is already a little cranky with how much I talk. He has discussed with me the beauty of silence. But Cassandra never discusses the beauty of silence.”

I thought Hector was a fortunate man. I thought perhaps the battle and the man of Andromache's name were both Hector, and I expected that she would be the victor. I said, “Does Cassandra know the past as well?”

“I don't know. How interesting. You must question her.”

Up on the highest battlement, Helen walked with a bent and silvery old lady. “Queen Hecuba,” said Andromache affectionately.

So this was the queen who had had to put up with all those other wives. I pressed against the wall to keep from being seen by Helen. Pleis must be alone somewhere, I thought suddenly. It will be safe for me to go comfort him.

Andromache hid from Helen too. “I think Helen will insist that the rules about Cassandra are kept. No visitors. No
getting out of the tower. If you were Helen, would you want Cassandra shrieking from the top of every wall that you pollute the city?”

“If I were the city,” I said, “I would not want Helen.”

Andromache told me a real secret. “Hector says,” she whispered, “that Paris should have been stoned. And Helen with him.”

I thought more highly of Hector. “Andromache, may we find Pleis?”

She regarded me thoughtfully. “You love the little one?”

“Yes.”

“Then we'll find him.”

The rooms in which Paris and Helen would live until the paint dried in their tiny house were in the same wing as Andromache's little space. The door was open. I stepped in.

Pleis sat on the floor between two long-legged pale gray hounds. Their muzzles were sharp and graceful, and they were neither barking nor growling. They seemed willing to have Pleis lean all over them.

Pleis was playing with a sword.

Not a parade sword, not a toy sword, but a great hacking instrument of death. It was too heavy for him to lift. He did not yet know which end was the handle and which the killing tool. He was pulling it by the blade, his little face intent upon the task.

A few feet away, Paris leaned on the wall, bright-eyed as a snake looking into a nest of baby birds. “Pick it up, son of Menelaus,” he said to the baby.

“He might cut off his own hand!” I exclaimed. “Take your sword away from him.”

“Well, well,” said Paris, straightening out of his slouch.
“The island princess. Daughter of one who does not keep promises.”

“You don't keep them either. By dining with Menelaus, you were promising him guest-friendship. You broke that promise.”

“The last person who accused me of that,” Paris said, “is dead, isn't he? The king of Sidon, wasn't he? I left him a corpse, didn't I?”

“Calli,” said Pleis happily, “sto.” The blade slipped out of his grasp and fell hard against his plump little leg. I cried out, but it fell flat side down. I moved to take the sword away from him, but Paris twisted my wrist behind my back. “Leave these rooms and don't ever come back. Or you will discover that I have a friend in need of a pretty little slave girl.”

Andromache lifted the sword out of Pleis' reach and pushed the dogs away with her slippered foot. “So you are Pleisthenes,” she said, scooping him up and kissing his little face.

Even though he was only two years old, this was a boy who would rather have the sword. He squirmed to get away from her.

“Why, Andromache,” said Paris. He had not cared about me, but he was shocked to see her. “My dear future sister,” he said uncertainly. He released me. “What an unexpected pleasure. I'm so sorry Helen is not here to meet you.”

It came to me that Andromache would outrank Helen. Andromache would marry Hector, the first son, the man who would be king when Priam died. Andromache would be queen of Troy! Helen would be merely another princess at the very end of a long, long row.

“We will be sisters, Helen and I,” said Andromache, as if
this pleased her; as if she and Hector had never discussed the stoning of Helen and Paris. “How proud Helen must be of her dear little son. Someday Hector and I will have a little boy as strong and sweet. There are so many good things happening, Paris. I see that you know my new princess friend, Callisto. We're going up to visit Cassandra now and we'll ask her what Callisto's future is.” She held Pleis high in the air so his tunic exposed his fat little tummy. She nibbled his belly button and tickled his ribs to distract him from the sword on the floor. He arched his back and giggled happily. “We're going to climb a tower, Pleis,” she told him. “A high tower with steps. Up up up up up. And Callisto is coming, too.”

Pleis beamed at her. “Up up up up up,” he agreed.

“That's very kind of you, Andromache,” said Paris courteously, “but his mother wants him to stay here.” Paris lifted Pleis out of Andromache's arms. I was relieved to see that Pleis didn't seem afraid of Paris. Just squirmy.

Paris dropped him to the floor, inches from the sword blade. The dogs were startled but glad. They licked his face and Pleis collapsed in giggles. He had forgotten the sword. As soon as the dogs went back to sleep, he would find it again.

Andromache spoke into the dust motes that shivered gold in the sunlight. “Do put the sword out of reach, my brother. You never were cleansed of blood guilt for the last little boy who died from your weapons. How awful were it to happen again.”

Andromache was short and Paris was not. She had to stare up into his eyes, a small chubby girl ordering around a prince who had just ruined one king and slaughtered another.

Eventually, Paris obeyed her.