The Firebrand (54 page)

“When she was cruelly stolen from us, you mean,” Khryse added savagely.

Kassandra said, “Why, yes, I am sure; even had I not recognized her, she recognized me; she addressed me by name and warned me against angering Agamemnon.”

“And did you say this to her father?”

“I did; but the message made him angry,” Kassandra said. “He as much as accused me of inventing it to torment him.”

Khryse said sullenly, “You know she has always had a grudge against me.”

“If I were going to invent a tale to annoy Khryse, I could make up a much better one than that,” Kassandra said. “I tell you, it happened exactly as I have said.”

“Well, then, you had better go with them to the Akhaian camp,” Charis said. “He is resolved to go down and in Apollo’s name demand the return of his daughter from the Akhaians; they too have priests of Apollo and observe His truce.”

Since this was exactly what she had suggested that he do, she was not surprised, except that he had not done it months or years ago. But she supposed that he had first exhausted all other remedies, whatever they might have been.

There were a good three dozen of them in the ceremonial robes and headdresses of the Sun Lord when at last they started down the long streets and arrived at the great gates of Troy. The guard was unwilling to open the gates, but when Khryse explained that they wished to parley with Agamemnon to arrange a prisoner’s return in the name of Apollo, the guard sent a herald to arrange a meeting. Then they stood in the hot sun for the best part of an hour, until they saw a tall, strongly built man, with thick black curly hair and an elaborately curled beard, approaching them with long, purposeful strides.

Kassandra had been as close as this to Agamemnon before; as always, horror and revulsion flooded her body. She stared at the ground and never raised her eyes, hoping he would not notice her.

He did not. He stared belligerently at Khryse and said, “What do you want? I am not a priest of Apollo; if you wish to arrange a festival truce or some such matter, your business is with my priests, and not with me.”

Khryse stepped forward. He was taller than Agamemnon, his head imposing even with his blond hair faded, his features strongly carved. His voice, deep and strong, rang out imposingly: “If you are Agamemnon of Mykenae, then my business is indeed with you. I am Khryse, priest of Apollo; and you are holding my daughter prisoner in your camp; she was taken three years ago at spring planting.”

“Oh?” Agamemnon inquired. “And which of my men is holding this woman?”

“Lord Agamemnon, her name is Chryseis; and I believe it is you who are holding her. In Apollo’s name, I declare myself ready to pay such ransom as is suitable and customary; and if you do not wish to release her, then I demand you pay me her bride-price and that we see her married with all proper formality.”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Agamemnon retorted. “I wondered what you wanted, all dressed up for ceremony. Well, Khryse, Priest of Apollo, listen here: I intend to keep her myself; and as for marrying her, I can’t, because I’ve already got a wife.” He gave a great sarcastic bellow of laughter.

“So I suggest you and your friends march right back inside Troy before I decide that I could use a few more women in the camp.” His eyes swept across the ranks of priests and priestesses. “Most of your women seem to be too old for bedding; I seem to have the only pretty one. But we could use a few cooks and wash-women.”

“You deliberately persist, then, in this insult to Apollo Sun Lord? You continue in this insult to His High Priest?” Khryse demanded.

Agamemnon spoke slowly, as if to a young child or a simpleton.

“Listen well, Priest,” he said. “I worship the Sky Thunderer, Zeus, and the Earth Shaker, Poseidon, Lord of Horses. I will not interfere in the affairs of Apollo; He is not my God. But by the same token, your Apollo would be well-advised not to interfere with me. This woman in my tent is mine, and I will neither release her nor pay a bride-price; and that is all I have to say to you. Now go.”

Controlling his anger, Khryse replied, “Agamemnon, I lay my curse on you; you are a man who has broken the sacred laws, and no child of yours shall honor your grave. And if you do not fear my curse, then fear the curse of Apollo, for it is His curse I lay upon your people, and you shall not escape it. His arrows shall fall upon you all, I so declare.”

“Declare anything you like,” Agamemnon said. “I have heard the rage of my foes before this, and it is of all sounds the most welcome to my heart. As for your Sun Lord, I defy His curse; let Him do His worst. Now get out of my camp, or I shall tell my archers to use you all for target practice.”

“So be it, my lord King,” said Khryse; “you shall see how long you can scorn the curse of Apollo.”

One of the archers cried out, “Shall I shoot the insolent Trojan, Lord Agamemnon?”

“By no means,” Agamemnon said in his rich, deep voice. “He is a priest, not a warrior. I do not kill women, little boys, eunuchs, nanny goats or priests.”

The laughter from the ranks of archers robbed Khryse’s exit of much of its dignity, but he strode firmly away without looking back; one by one the priests and priestesses followed him. Kassandra kept her eyes lowered, but she could feel, for some reason, Agamemnon’s eyes on her. It might only be that she was the youngest of the women from Troy, almost all the other priestesses chosen being well past fifty; but perhaps it was something more. She knew only that she did not want to meet Agamemnon’s glance.

They climbed through the city to the balcony of the Sun Lord’s house, which looked down upon the plains before Troy. Khryse had disappeared briefly from among them; when he reappeared, he was wearing the golden mask of the God, and bearing the ritual bow. Suddenly it appeared that he grew taller, more imposing; the eyes of all the Akhaians below were lifted to where he stood. Khryse raised his bow and cried out,
Beware, you who have offended My priest!
and Kassandra realized Who stood there beneath the mask, and the voice, strong and resonant and more than human, rang throughout Troy and to the farthest corner of the Akhaian camp below:

Even Kassandra, who was familiar with the voice of the God, was paralyzed with terror. She could not have moved a muscle nor spoken a word.

Quickly the form who at once was and was not Khryse shot three arrows into the air. One of them fell directly upon the roof of Agamemnon’s tent; another before the tent of Akhilles; the third into the very center of the camp. Kassandra watched, feeling a dreadful stillness, as if she had watched all this before. It was as if she were very far away, and a thick wall of glass, or the weight of an ocean, rippled before her, cutting off what she saw and heard.

But yet,
she thought,
if the Akhaians are cursed, somehow we will suffer for it; we are at their mercy. I wonder whether Priam realizes that. If he does not, I am sure that Hector does.

Then slowly she began to be aware again of what was going on around her: the glare of midday, the light reflected off the city walls and the plain below, the laughter and jeers of the Akhaians. They seemed to think this a charade, a gesture; it never occurred to them that perhaps Apollo Himself had cursed their people and their army.

Whatever the truth, there were things to be done. She went to the Temple and was set to the task of accepting and tallying the offerings. After an hour of counting and tallying up flasks of oil and wheaten loaves she felt as if she had never been away from Troy.

She worked till sunset. When she had finished with the offerings, she went to care for the serpents and to see what places had been found for them. Then she went to Charis, the most senior priestess, and told her that alone she could not easily care for so many snakes if she had other duties as well; she asked for someone to train to help her with them and learn serpent-lore. Charis asked if Phyllida would be satisfactory to her.

“Yes; she has always been my friend,” Kassandra replied, and Charis sent for Phyllida and asked if it was acceptable to her.

“I will teach you everything I learned in Colchis,” Kassandra promised, and Phyllida seemed pleased.

“Yes, and if we work together, our children can grow up as brother and sister,” Phyllida said. “It was I who bathed your little one yesterday and gave her her supper. She is very quick and clever, and someday she will be pretty too.”

Kassandra suspected that Phyllida had said this to flatter her, but it did not altogether displease her. When it had all been arranged, they went out again to look down into the Akhaian camp. The glare and heat of the daytime had subsided, and a light wind had sprung up; they could see blowing dust in the Akhaian camp, and the forms of many people, some of them clad in the white robes of the servants of Apollo.

“So they were not quite as casual about it as they seemed,” Phyllida said. She had not taken part in the mission to the camp, but she had heard all about it, and Kassandra could see it had lost nothing in the telling. “Look,” she said, “they are performing rituals to purify the camp and appease the Sun Lord.”

“Well they might, if they scorn His curse,” Kassandra said.

“I do not think it is the soldiers who scorn His curse,” Phyllida said. “I think it is only Agamemnon himself; and we know already that he is a godless man.”

“What are they about now?” Kassandra asked.

“They are building fires to cleanse the grounds,” Phyllida said, then shrank back at the great cry of mourning that rose from the Akhaians. They had dragged out a body from one of the tents and were casting it into the flames.

It was too far to hear the words of the cries of despair, but they had heard such cries before. Phyllida gasped, “There is plague in their camp!”

And Kassandra said, in horror, “This, then, is the Sun Lord’s curse!”

EVERY MORNING and evening for ten days they watched as bodies of plague victims in the camp were burned; after the third day, the bodies were dragged a long way down the shore and burned there, for fear of contagion. Kassandra, who had seen the dirt and filth and disorder within the camp, was not surprised that there was sickness, though she did not make light of the Sun Lord’s curse, and she knew the Akhaians believed in it. At sunrise, at high noon and again at sunset, Khryse strode the battlements of Troy, wearing Apollo’s mask and carrying His bow, and whenever he appeared there were cries and shrieks for mercy in the Akhaian camp.

Priam proclaimed that every Trojan soldier and citizen must appear each morning before the priests of Apollo, and that anyone who showed signs of illness was to be confined alone to his own house. This isolated a few people with bad colds, and one or two men who had been indiscriminate in exploring the women’s district. He closed two or three brothels and also a filthy market, but there were no signs, so far, of plague inside the walls of Troy. He declared a holiday for prayers and sacrifices to Apollo, imploring that the city continue to be spared the curse. However, when Khryse begged for audience and asked Priam also to request the return of Chryseis, he answered him sharply: “You have called a God to your side, and if that is not enough, what more do you think a mortal, even the King of Troy, could do?”

“You mean you will do nothing to help me?”

“Why should it matter to me what becomes of your wretched daughter? I might have felt a fellow father’s feeling, had you asked three years ago when first she was taken, but you have not appealed to me before this; I cannot believe you are much in need of my help—except perhaps to boast that the King of Troy is your ally,” Priam said.

Khryse said hotly, “If I called down Apollo’s curse on the Argive camp, I can as easily curse Troy—”

Priam lifted his hand to stop him.

“No!” he thundered. “Not a word! Raise a finger or speak a syllable to curse Troy, and by Apollo’s self, I swear I will myself have you flung into the Akhaian camp from the highest rampart of the city!”

“As Your Majesty wishes,” Khryse said, bowed deeply and went away. Priam scowled, his feathers still ruffled.

“That man is too proud! Did you hear him—threatening to curse Troy itself!” He looked around to his advisers in his throne room. “Should he ask audience again with me, make certain that I have no time to speak with him!”

Kassandra was not displeased with the interview. Still at the back of her mind had been an old fear: that if Khryse, as he once threatened, were to go to Priam and ask to marry her, her father would be pleased to thrust her, even unwilling, into marriage—any marriage—and would find no reason for refusing an apparently respectable priest of Apollo. Now that she knew that Priam found Khryse almost as distasteful as she did herself, she breathed a sigh of relief.

TEN DAYS they watched the plague raging in the Akhaian camp. On the tenth day the soldiers dragged out a noble white horse and sacrificed it to Apollo, and some time later, a messenger with Apollo’s serpent staff came up to the city and asked for a truce for the purpose of speaking with Apollo’s priests.

“A delegation will come down to the camp,” he was told. Khryse, of course, was first among them. Kassandra did not ask if she might join the group; she simply slipped away to put on her ceremonial robes and went with them.

Agamemnon, Akhilles and several of the other leaders, among whom Kassandra recognized Odysseus and Patroklos, were drawn up in ranks behind the priests of Apollo. The chief priest among the Akhaians, a lean, sinewy man who looked like an athlete, approached Khryse.