The Firebrand (4 page)

“Nothing that I can remember, my lady.”

The priestess frowned, and from a pouch tied at her waist she drew out a small handful of pebbles; she knelt on the floor and cast them like knucklebones, studying and muttering over their arrangement, casting them again and yet a third time, finally gathering them up and returning them to the pouch.

Then she raised her eyes to Hecuba.

“Thus speaks the Messenger of the Gods of Olympos to you. You bear a son under an evil fate, who will destroy the city of Troy.”

Hecuba caught her breath in consternation, but felt her husband’s fingers clasping hers, strong and warm and reassuring.

“Can anything be done to avert this fate?” Priam asked.

The priestess shrugged. “In seeking to avert fate, men often bring it closer. The Gods have sent you a warning, but they have not chosen to tell you of what you must do to avert this doom. It might be safest to do nothing.”

Priam frowned and said, “Then the child must be exposed at birth,” and Hecuba cried out in horror.

“No! No! It was but a dream, a dream . . .”

“A warning from Hermes,” said Priam severely. “Expose the boy as soon as he is born; hear me!” He added, in the inflexible formula which gave the words the force of laws carved into stone: “I have spoken; let it be done!”

Hecuba crumpled weeping on her pillows, and Priam said tenderly, “I would not for all Troy have given you this grief, my dearest, but the Gods cannot be mocked.”

“Gods!” Hecuba cried, frantic. “What kind of God is it that sends deceitful nightmares to destroy an innocent little child, a newborn babe in the cradle? Among my people,” she added resentfully, “a child is its mother’s, and no one but she who carried it for most of a year and brought it to birth can say its fate; if she refuses to suckle it and bring it up, that is her own choice. What right has a
man
over children?” She did not say
a mere man,
but her tone of voice made it obvious.

“The right of a
father,
” Priam said sternly. “I am master of this house, and as I have spoken, so shall it be done—hear me, woman!”

“Don’t say
woman
to me in that tone of voice,” cried Hecuba. “I am a free citizen and a Queen and not one of your slaves or concubines!” Yet for all that, she knew that Priam would have his way; when she had chosen to marry a man from those who dwelt in cities and assumed rights over their women, she knew she had consented to this. Priam arose from her side and gave the priestess a piece of gold; she bowed and departed.

Three days later, Hecuba went into labor and gave birth to twins: first a son, then a daughter, as like as one rosebud to another on the same branch. They were both healthy and well formed, and cried lustily, although they were so tiny that the boy’s head fitted into Hecuba’s palm, and the girl was smaller still.

“Look at him, my lord,” she said fiercely to Priam when he came. “He is no bigger than a kitten! And you fear
this
was sent by some God to bring disaster on our city?”

“There is something in what you say,” admitted Priam. “Royal blood is, after all, royal blood, and sacred; he is the son of a King of Troy ...” He considered for a moment. “No doubt it would be enough to have him fostered far away from the city; I have an old and trusted servant, a shepherd on the slopes of Mount Ida, and he will bring up the child. Will that content you, my wife?”

Hecuba knew that the alternative was to have the child exposed on a mountain, and he was so small and frail that he would die quickly. “Let it be so, then, in the name of the Goddess,” she said with resignation, and handed the boy to Priam, who held the child awkwardly, as one unused to handling babies.

He looked into the child’s eyes and said, “Greetings, little son.” Hecuba sighed with relief; after having formally acknowledged a child, a father could not have it killed, or expose it to die.

Hector and Polyxena had been allowed to come and speak with their mother. Hector said now, “Will you give my brother a royal name, Father?”

Priam scowled, thinking it over. Then he said, “Alexandros. Let the girl be called Alexandra, then.”

He went away, taking Hector with him, and Hecuba lay with the dark-haired baby girl in the curve of her arm, thinking that she could comfort herself with the knowledge that her son lived, even if she could not rear him herself, while she had her daughter to keep.
Alexandra,
she thought.
I will call her Kassandra.

The princess had remained in the room with the women and now edged close to Hecuba’s side. Hecuba asked, “Do you like your little sister, my darling?”

“No; she is red and ugly, and not even as pretty as my doll,” said Polyxena.

“All babies are like that when they are born,” said Hecuba. “You were just as red and ugly; soon she will be just as pretty as you are.”

The child scowled. “Why do you want another daughter, Mother, when you have me?”

“Because, darling, if one daughter is a good thing, with two daughters one is twice blessed.”

“But Father did not think that two sons were better than one son,” Polyxena argued, and Hecuba recalled the prophecy spoken by the woman in the street. Among her own tribe, twins were thought to be, in themselves, an evil omen, and were invariably put to death. If she had remained with them, she would have had to see both infants sacrificed.

Hecuba still felt a residue of superstitious fear; what could have gone amiss to send her two children at one birth, like an animal littering? That was what the women of her tribe believed must be done; yet she had been told that the true reason for the sacrifice of twins was only that it was all but impossible for a woman to suckle two children in a single season. Her twins at least had not been sacrificed to the poverty of the tribe. There were plenty of wet-nurses in Troy; she could have kept them both. Yet Priam had decreed otherwise. She had lost one child—but, by the blessing of the Goddess, only one, not both.

One of her women murmured, almost out of hearing, “Priam is mad! To send away a son and rear a daughter?”

Among my people,
Hecuba remembered,
a daughter is valued no less than a son; if this little one had been born in my tribe, I could rear her to be a warrior woman! But if she had been born to my tribe, she would not have lived. Here she will be valued only for the bride-price she will bring when she is married, as I was, to some King.

But what would become of her son? Would he live in obscurity as a shepherd all his life? It was better than death, perhaps, and the God who had sent the dream and was therefore responsible for his fate might yet protect him.

LIGHT GLEAMED in eye-hurting flashes from the sea and the white stone. Kassandra narrowed her eyes against the light and tugged softly at Hecuba’s sleeve.

“Why do we go to the Temple today, Mother?” she asked.

Secretly she did not care. It was a rare adventure for her to be allowed outside the women’s quarters and rarer yet to go outside the palace altogether. Whatever their destination, the excursion was welcome.

Hecuba said softly, “We go to pray that the child I am to bear this winter will be a son.”

“Why, Mother? You have a son already. I should think you would rather have another daughter; you only have two of us girls. I would rather have another sister.”

“I am sure you would,” said the Queen, smiling, “but your father wants another son. Men always want sons so they can grow up to fight in their armies and defend the city.”

“Is there a war?”

“No, not now; but there are always wars when a city is as rich as Troy.”

“But if I had another sister she might be a warrior woman, as you were when you were a girl, and learn to use weapons and defend the city as well as any son.” Then she paused to consider. “I do not think Polyxena could be a soldier; she is too soft and timid. But I would like to be a warrior woman. Like you.”

“I am sure you would, Kassandra; but it is not the custom for women of Troy.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, why not? Customs
are.
There is no reason for them.”

Kassandra gave her mother a skeptical look, but she had already learned not to question that tone in her mother’s voice. She thought secretly that her mother was the most queenly and beautiful woman in the world, tall and strong-looking, in her low-cut bodice and flounced skirt, but she no longer quite believed her all-knowing like the Goddess. In the six years of her life, she had heard something similar nearly every day and believed it less with every year; but when Hecuba spoke like that, Kassandra knew she would get no further explanation.

“Tell me about when you were a warrior, Mother.”

“I am of the nomad tribe, the riding women,” Hecuba began. She was almost always willing to talk about her early life—more so, Kassandra thought, since this latest pregnancy. “Our fathers and brothers are also of the horse-folk, and they are very brave.”

“Are they warriors?”

“No, child; among the horse-tribes, the women are the warriors. The men are healers and magicians, and they know all kinds of wisdom and about the lore of trees and herbs.”

“When I am older can I go to live with them?”

“The Kentaurs? Of course not; women cannot be fostered in a man’s tribe.”

“No; I mean with your tribe, the riding women.”

“I do not think your father would like that,” said Hecuba, thinking that this small, solemn daughter might well have grown to be a leader among her own nomad people, “but perhaps someday it can be arranged. Among my tribe a father has authority only over his sons, and it is the mother who decrees the destiny of a daughter. You would have to learn to ride and to use weapons.”

She took up the small, soft hand in hers, thinking that it was hardly the hand of a warrior woman.

“Which Temple is that—up there?” Kassandra asked, pointing upward to the highest of the terraces above them, indicating a building that gleamed brilliantly white in the sun. From where they stood, Kassandra, leaning on the wall that guarded the winding stairway upward, could look down and see the roofs of the palace and the small figures of the women laying out washing to dry, small trees in tubs, the bright colors of their clothing and the mats where they lay to rest in the sun; and far below that, the city walls looking out over the plain.

“It is the Temple of Pallas Athene, the greatest of the Goddesses of your father’s people.”

“Is She the same as the Great Goddess, the one you call Earth Mother?”

“All the Goddesses are one, as all the Gods are one; but they show themselves with different faces to mankind, in different cities and at different times. Here in Troy, Pallas Athene is the Goddess as Maiden, because in Her temple under the care of Her maidens is guarded the holiest object within our city. It is called the Palladium.” Hecuba paused, but Kassandra, sensing a story, was mouse-silent, and Hecuba went on in a reminiscent tone.

“They say that when the Goddess Athene was young she had a mortal playmate, the Libyan maiden Pallas, and when Pallas died Athene mourned her so greatly that She added Her name to her own and was thereafter known as Pallas Athene; She fashioned an image of Her friend and set it up in the Temple of Zeus on Olympos. At that time, Erechtheus, who was King in Crete—your father’s forefather before his people came to this part of the world—had a great herd of a thousand beautiful cattle, and Boreas, the son of the North Wind, loved them, and visited them as a great white bull; and these sacred cattle became the Bull-Gods of Crete.”

“I did not know that the Kings of Crete were our forefathers,” Kassandra said.

“There are many things you do not know,” Hecuba said in reproof, and Kassandra held her breath—would her mother be too cross to finish the story? But Hecuba’s frown was fleeting, and she went on.

“Ilos, the son of Erechtheus, came to these shores and entered the sacred Games here. He was the victor in the games, and as his prize he won fifty youths and fifty maidens. And rather than making them his slaves, he said, ‘I will free them, and with them I will found a city.’ And so he set forth in a ship at the will of the Gods—and he sacrificed to the North Wind to send him to the right place for his city, which he meant to call Ilion; which is another name for the city of Troy.”

“And did the North Wind blow him
here
?” Kassandra asked.

“No; he was blown from his course at sea by a whirl-wind, and when he came to rest near the mouth of our holy Scamander, the Gods sent one of these cows, a beautiful heifer, a daughter of the North Wind, and a voice came to Ilos, crying out, ‘Follow the cow! Follow the cow! Where the cow lies down, there establish your city!’ And they say that the cow wandered to the bend of the river Scamander and there she lay down; and there Ilos built the city of Troy. And one night he awoke hearing another voice from Heaven, saying, ‘Preserve the image I give you; for while Pallas dwells within your city, your city shall never fall.’ And he woke and beheld the image of Pallas, with a distaff in one hand and a spear in the other, like Athene’s self. So when the city was built, he built this Temple first, on the high place, far up here, and he dedicated it to Athene—She was quite a new face of the Goddess, then, one of the great Olympians, worshiped even by those who honor the Sky Gods and the Thunderer—he made Her the patron of the city. And She brought to us the arts of weaving and the gifts of the vine and the olive, wine and oil.”

“But we are not going to Her Temple today, Mother?”

“No, my love; though the Maiden Goddess is also patron of childbirth and I should sacrifice also to her. Today we seek the Sun Lord Apollo. He is the Lord of the Oracles as well; he slew the great Python, the Goddess of the Underworld, and became Lord of the Underworld as well.”

“Tell me, if the Python was a Goddess, how could she be slain?”