The Firebrand (7 page)

Hecuba looked blankly at Priam and said, “I have taken her nowhere. I do not have the faintest idea what she is talking about.”

“Come here, Kassandra,” said Priam, frowning ominously and pushing Polyxena away from his knee. “Tell me more about this; where did you see the boy? Was he in the city?”

“No, Father, I have only seen him in the scrying-bowl. He watches the sheep on Mount Ida, and he looks exactly like me.”

She was frightened at the abrupt change in her father’s face. He roared, “And what were you doing with a scrying-bowl, you little wretch?”

He turned on Hecuba with a gesture of rage, and for a moment, Kassandra thought he would strike the Queen.

“You, Lady, this is your doing—I leave the rearing of the girls to you, and here is one of my daughters meddling with scrying and sorceries, oracles and the like—”

“But who
is
he?” Kassandra demanded. Her need for an answer was greater than her fear. “And why does he look so much like me?”

In return, her father roared wordlessly, and struck her across the face with such force that she lost her balance and skidded down the steps near his throne, falling and striking her head.

Her mother shouted with indignation, hurrying to raise her. “What have you done to my daughter, you great brute?”

Priam glared at his wife and rose angrily to his feet. He raised his hand to strike her, and Kassandra cried out through her sobs, “No! Don’t hit Mother; she didn’t do anything!” At the edge of her vision she saw Polyxena looking at them wide-eyed but too frightened to speak, and thought with more contempt than anger,
She would stand by and let the King beat our mother?
She cried out, “It was not Mother’s fault, she did not even know! It was the God who said I might—He said when I was grown up I was to be His priestess, and it was He who showed me how to use the scrying-bowl—”

“Be silent!” Priam commanded, and glared over her head at Hecuba. She could not imagine why he was so angry.

“I’ll have no sorceries in my palace, Lady—do you hear me?” Priam said. “Send her to be fostered before she spreads this nonsense to the other girls, the proper maidenly ones . . .” He looked around, and his frown softened as his eyes rested on the simpering Polyxena. Then he glared at Kassandra again where she still crouched, holding her bleeding head. Now she knew there was
really
some secret about the boy whose face she had seen.

He would not talk about Hesione.
He does not care. It is enough for him that she will be married to one of those invaders who carried her off.
The thought, coupled with the fear and the shame of the vision—if that was what it had been—made her feel a sudden dread.
Father will not tell me. Well, then, I shall ask the Lord Apollo.

He knows even more than Father. And He told me I was to be His own; if it were I and not Hesione, He would not have let me be carried away by that man. It is enough for Father that she will be married; if that man carried me off, would he let me go to a marriage like that?
Her vision of the man with the eagle face was never to leave her. But to block it out, she closed her eyes and tried to summon up again the golden voice of the Sun Lord, saying,
You are Mine.

KASSANDRA’S BRUISES were still yellow and green, the moon faded to a narrow morning crescent. She stood beside her mother, who was laying a few of her tunics in a leather bag, with her new sandals and a warm winter cloak.

“But it is not winter yet,” she protested.

“It is colder on the plains,” Hecuba told her. “Believe me, you will need it for riding, my love.”

Kassandra leaned against her mother and said, almost in tears, “I don’t want to go away from you.”

“And I will miss you, too, but I think you will be happy,” Hecuba said. “I wish I were going with you.”

“Then why don’t you come, Mother?”

“Your father needs me.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Kassandra protested. “He has his other women; he could manage without you.”

“I am sure he would,” Hecuba said, grimacing a little. “But I do not want to leave him to them; they are not as careful of his health and his honor as I am. Also, there is your baby brother, and he needs me.”

This made no sense to Kassandra; Troilus had been sent to the men’s quarters at the New Year. But if her mother did not wish to go, there was nothing she could say. Kassandra hoped she would never have children, if having them meant never doing what you wished.

Hecuba raised her head, hearing sounds down in the courtyard. “I think they are coming,” she said, and took Kassandra’s hand in hers. Together they hurried down the long flight of stairs.

Many of the housefolk were gathered, staring at the women who had ridden their horses, white and bay and black, right into the court. Their leader, a tall woman with a dark, freckled face, vaulted down from the back of her horse and ran to catch Hecuba in her arms.

“Sister! What joy to see you,” she cried. Hecuba held her, and Kassandra marveled to see her staid mother laughing and crying at once. After a moment the tall stranger let her go and said, “You have grown fat and soft with indoor living; and your skin is so white and pale, you might be a ghost!”

“Is that so bad?” Hecuba asked.

The woman scowled at her and asked, “And these are your daughters? Are they house-mice too?”

“That you will have to decide for yourself,” Hecuba said, beckoning the girls forward. “This is Polyxena. She is already sixteen.”

“She looks too frail for an outdoor life such as ours, Hecuba. I think perhaps you have kept her indoors too long; but we will do what we can with her, and return her to you healthy and strong.”

Polyxena shrank away behind her mother, and the tall Amazon laughed.

“No?”

“No; you are to have the little one, Kassandra,” said Hecuba.

“The little one? How old is she?”

“Twelve years,” Hecuba answered. “Kassandra, child, come and greet your kinswoman Penthesilea, the chief of our tribe.”

Kassandra looked attentively at the older woman. She was taller by several finger-breadths than Hecuba, who was herself tall for a woman. She wore a pointed leather cap, under which Kassandra could see tucked-up coils of faded ginger-colored hair, and a short tight tunic; her legs were long and lean in leather breeches which came below the knee. Her face was thin and lined, her complexion not only burned dark by the sun, but spotted with thousands of brown freckles. She looked, Kassandra thought, more like a warrior than a woman; but her face was enough like Hecuba’s own that Kassandra had no doubt that this was her kinswoman. She smiled at Kassandra good-naturedly.

“Do you think you will like to come with us, then? You are not frightened? I think your sister is afraid of our horses,” she added.

“Polyxena is afraid of everything,” Kassandra said. “She wants to be what my father calls a proper good girl.”

“And you don’t?”

“Not if it means staying in the house all the time,” said Kassandra, and saw Penthesilea smile. “What is your horse’s name? Will he bite?”

“
She
is called Racer, and she has never bitten me yet,” said Penthesilea. “You may make friends with her if you are able.”

Kassandra went boldly forward and held out her hand as she had been taught to do with a strange dog so that it could smell her scent. The horse butted its great head down and snorted, and Kassandra stroked the silky nose and looked into the great loving eyes. She felt, returning that wide-eyed gaze, that she had already found a friend among these strangers.

Penthesilea said, “Well, are you ready to come with us, then?”

“Oh,
yes!
” Kassandra breathed fervently. Penthesilea’s thin stern face looked friendlier when she smiled.

“Do you think you can learn to ride?”

Friendly or not, the horse looked
very
large, and very high off the ground; but Kassandra said valiantly, “If you could learn and my mother could learn, I suppose there is no reason I cannot.”

“Won’t you come up to the women’s quarters and share some refreshment before you must go?” asked Hecuba.

“Why, yes, if you will have someone look after our horses,” Penthesilea said. Hecuba summoned one of the servants and gave orders to take Penthesilea’s horse and those of her two companions to the stables. The two women with her, dressed as she was dressed, the Amazon leader introduced as Charis and Melissa. Charis was thin and pale, almost as freckled as the Queen, but her hair was the color of brass; Melissa had brown curly hair and was plump and pink-cheeked. They were, Kassandra decided, fifteen or sixteen. She wondered if they were Penthesilea’s daughters but was too shy to ask.

Climbing to the women’s quarters, Kassandra wondered why she had never noticed before how dark it was inside. Hecuba had called the waiting-women to bring wine and sweets, and while the guests nibbled at them, Penthesilea called Kassandra to her and said, “If you are to ride with us, you must be properly dressed, my dear. We brought a pair of breeches for you. Charis will help you to put them on. And you should have a warm cloak for riding; when the sun is down it grows cold quickly.”

“Mother made me a warm cloak,” Kassandra said, and went with Charis into her room to fetch the bag of her possessions. The leather breeches were a little big for her—Kassandra wondered who had worn them before this, for they were shiny in the seat with hard wear. But they were astonishingly comfortable once she had grown used to their stiffness against her legs. She thought that now she could run like the wind without tripping over her skirts. She was threading the leather belt through the loops when she heard her father’s step and his boisterous voice.

“Well, Kinswoman, have you come to lead my armies to Mykenae to recover Hesione? And such splendid horses—I saw them in the stable. Like the immortal horses of Poseidon’s own herd! Where did you find them?”

“We traded for them with Idomeneus, the King of Crete,” said Penthesilea. “We had not heard about Hesione; what happened?”

“Agamemnon’s men from Mykenae, or so we thought,” Priam said.“Akhaians anyhow, raiders. Rumor says Agamemnon is a vicious and cruel King. Even his own men love him not; but they fear him.”

“He is a powerful fighter,” said Penthesilea. “I hope to meet him one day in battle. If you yourself will not lead your armies to Mykenae to recover Hesione, wait only until I summon my women. You will have to give us ships, but I could have Hesione back to you by the next new moon.”

“If it were feasible to go against the Akhaians now, I would need no woman to lead my army,” Priam said, scowling. “I would rather wait and see what demands he makes of me.”

“And what of Hesione, in Agamemnon’s hands?” asked Penthesilea. “Are you going to abandon her? You know what will happen to her among the Akhaians!”

“One way or another, I would have had to find her a husband,” said Priam. “This at least saves me a dowry, since if it is Agamemnon who has taken her, he cannot have the insolence to ask a dowry for a prize of war.”

Penthesilea scowled, and Kassandra too was shocked: Priam was rich; why should he begrudge a dowry?

“Priam, Agamemnon already has a wife,” said Penthesilea: “Klytemnestra, the daughter of Leda and her King, Tyndareus. She bore Agamemnon a daughter who must be seven or eight years old by now. I cannot believe they are so short of women in Akhaia that they must resort to stealing them . . . nor that Agamemnon is so much in need of a concubine that he would carry one off when he could have any chief’s daughter within his kingdom.”

“So he married the daughter of Leda?” Priam frowned for a moment and said, “Is that the one who was, they said, so beautiful that Aphrodite would be jealous, and her father had to choose among almost forty suitors for her?”

“No,” said Penthesilea. “They were twins, which is always ill fortune. One was Klytemnestra; the other daughter, Helen, was the beauty. Agamemnon managed to inveigle Leda and Tyndareus—God knows how he managed it—into marrying Helen off to his brother, Menelaus, while he married Klytemnestra.”

“I don’t envy Menelaus,” said Priam. “A man is cursed who has a beautiful wife.” He smiled absently at Hecuba. “Thank all the Gods you never brought me that kind of trouble, my dear. Nor are your daughters dangerously beautiful.”

Hecuba looked at her husband coldly. Penthesilea said, “That could be a matter of opinion. But from what I know of Agamemnon, unless rumor lies, he is thinking less of woman’s beauty than of power; through Leda’s daughters he thinks to claim all Mykenae, and Sparta too, and call himself King. And then, I suppose, he will seek to gain more power to the north—and make you look to your own city here in Troy.”

“I think they are trying to force me to deal with them,” Priam said, “to recognize them as Kings—which I will do when Kerberos opens his doors and lets the dead out of Hades’ realm.”

“I doubt they will seek gold,” said Penthesilea. “There is gold enough in Mykenae—though rumor has it that Agamemnon is a greedy man. If I should make a guess, it would be that what Agamemnon will demand is that you give him trading rights through the strait yonder”—she pointed to the sea—“without the toll you charge.”

“Never,” said Priam. “A God brought my people here to the banks of the Scamander; and whoever wishes to pass beyond to the country of the North Wind must render tribute to the Gods of Troy.” He stared crossly at Penthesilea and demanded, “What is it to you? What has a woman to do with the government of countries and the payment of tribute?”

“I too dwell within the lands where the Akhaian raiders dare to come,” said the Amazon Queen. “And if they should steal one of my women, I would make them pay for it, not in gold or dowries alone, but in blood. And since you could not stop them from carrying off your own sister, I repeat: my warriors are at your service if you wish to lead them against those pirates.”