The Firebrand (38 page)

The year was advancing; belated winter rains swept softly in from the sea, and on some bare branches could be seen little lumps where leaves would eventually unfold. One day she stood high atop the Sun Lord’s house and heard a faraway shrill crying.

“Look, the cranes are flying north again.”
I wonder,
she thought,
to what faraway land they travel, beyond the country of the North Wind.
But her companions had more practical thoughts in their minds.

“Soon it will be time for the spring planting festival,” said Chryseis, and there was a greedy gleam in her eyes. “I am tired of being shut in with the women.” Kassandra was struck with fear; surely with spring, the Akhaians would come. The last winter moon swelled and shrank, and there came days gray with soft rains; and a few days after the northward flight of the cranes, the clouds cleared, and the narrow new moon in the sky announced the coming of spring and the planting festival.

On the first day after the new moon, Kassandra was summoned to the palace to her mother’s presence; she found her with her women, making implements for the planting rites, and a priestess of Earth Mother was there supervising the work.

Kassandra did not know what she was going to say until she heard herself saying it:

“Are you planning the festival so that the Akhaians can enjoy it? Surely to hold a festival now is only inviting them to come and despoil it!”

The priestess, an aging woman Kassandra did not know well, scowled at her.

“What would you suggest as an alternative, Lady Kassandra? We cannot refrain from planting the grain.”

“Oh, I know that the grain must be sown,” Kassandra said, almost frantic; “but must we draw attention to it with a festival?”

The priestess asked, frowning, “Do you expect to enjoy the gifts of the Goddess without doing Her honor?”

Kassandra, hardly knowing what to say, wanted to cry.
If the Goddess is so great and benevolent,
she thought,
surely She would give us the grain without demanding so much. Is the Earth Goddess an old market woman to haggle with us—so much grain for so many songs and dances?
Since she could not say that, she said nothing at all, and knew the priestess was frowning at her with disapproval.

“What has the festival to do with you, who have chosen to remain a virgin in the house of the Sun Lord and do not pay the Goddess Her due?”

“It was not altogether by choice,” she said meekly. “The Sun Lord called me, and Earth Goddess made no protest. If She had demanded of me that I serve Her, I would have obeyed.”

But the priestess was still scowling at her, seeming to demand an answer, and Kassandra said, “Since I too am fed by Her bounty, I see no reason for a festival which will make the planting useless. For if the Akhaians come to destroy our festival, we will reap little from this planting.”

“Are you saying to me that even the Akhaians do not pay honor to the Goddess?”

“I say only that I fear their impiety,” said Kassandra. “If you believe that they pay honor to the Goddess, why not ask one of their devotees, or send a messenger to negotiate a truce and a pledge that they will not interfere with Earth Mother’s rites?”

She bowed silently to the priestess, her warning given. It was no part of her duty to say more. Her mother had been looking on without speaking, and Kassandra crossed the room to join her.

“Can you not understand my fear, Mother?”

“I trust to the goodness of the Goddess; surely She can raise Her hand if She will to strike against these Akhaians,” said Hecuba reprovingly. “You are too full of fears, Kassandra.”

“You have served Earth Mother all these years; has She ever lifted Her hand to protect you?” asked Kassandra.

Her mother looked deeply displeased and said, “Such questions are not for women to ask; you who are a priestess should know better than to say such things. The Gods are not slow to punish those who speak against or question Them.”

I should have been the one to say that,
thought Kassandra.
I have lived in the Sun Lord’s house and seen how He strikes—and how He protects—His own.
She sighed and said no more.

Her mother said gently, “I am not reproving you, Kassandra; but if you have found no happiness in the Sun Lord’s house you should return to us here. I cannot think it entirely a good thing for a girl of your years to remain this long a maiden; if you return to Priam’s house, your father will find you a husband. It would please me well to see you married and with a child in your arms. And then there would be no more of these evil dreams and prophecies to torment you.”

In spite of her mother’s loving tone, Kassandra felt a wave of anger so great that it choked her.
Ah, that is the remedy for all things that are wrong with women. If a woman is unhappy, or if she makes a mistake, or does not do what everyone else wants her to do, then she would be better to take a husband; and if she had a child, it would be the remedy for all her ills.
She said to her mother, “Ah, you too, Mother? When you rode with Penthesilea and her women, would you have been so quick to say that was what ailed me? Would you give me to a husband or see me pregnant just so I would not speak the truth and frighten people?”

Hecuba was dismayed at her angry tone. She patted Kassandra’s knotted fingers and smoothed them gently, trying to unlock them. “Don’t be angry, my dear; I don’t know why you are always so angry. I only want to see you happy, my child.”

“I am angry because I am surrounded by fools,” said Kassandra, “and your only answer would be to make me one of them.”

She stood up and flung herself out of the room. Her mother was hopeless. And yet there had been a time when she was strong and self-sufficient; Kassandra had her weapons to prove it. And why had she let her mother divert her from the real issue, which was the danger to the spring planting? Her mother had chosen to substitute for it the old issue of marriage—as if a married woman automatically gained wisdom. Andromache was certainly no wiser for her marriage to Hector, nor Creusa for being married to Aeneas.

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 a catastrophe, she would be far from it when it happened; she had delivered the warning, and that was quite enough.

But outside her room, the sounds of the 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. She half expected 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 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, that 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 carry 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 so many babies’, had darkened to a glowing hazel not unlike Paris’ 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 knew our customs well enough by now to know that.”

“Still, if there is need, I will come and pray with the others 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. Now, 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 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:

Other women took up the song. Kassandra heard Creusa’s strong, sweet voice, and then the others’; 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, trying to attract the attention of the child to where Paris stood in his bright armor, the pale early sunlight reflecting off it in arrowlike 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, wearing a scarlet robe, raised her hands for the invocation, then paused and beckoned to Andromache; the younger woman, in her own 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 favor—she was now passing beyond the years of child-bearing, 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 virgins and all others who had never borne a living child left the plowed 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 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 around his neck, took the wooden plow 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 plow; Kassandra knew that this animal had been chosen from all the beasts in Troy for the King’s plowing because it was without blemish, and the owner had been highly paid.

Priam dug the plowshare into the field, and again a cheer arose as it opened a dark brown strip of fertile loam within 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 Earth Mother at being thus ravished. During her sojourn with the Amazons, she 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 plow broke through the soil.

Now all the fertile women of the city burst onto the field; all together they stripped off their upper garments, exposing their breasts, and made symbolic gestures of giving their milk to 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.