The Firebrand (71 page)

She shivered at the sight of the beloved face of the Sun Lord, crowned by brilliant golden curls; would He turn and see her walking in the forbidden realms? Resolutely she turned back to Hector’s shadowy form.

“What of Troilus? Is it well with him?”

“He was with me for a little; he came running out just a little behind me,” Hector said. “But he remained at the palace with Mother; he was trying to tell her not to grieve. He would not believe that he could not make her hear him. Perhaps she would listen to you if you told her; she knows you are a priestess and wise in such things.”

“Ah, I do not know if she will listen to me either, dear Brother,” Kassandra said. “She has her own opinions and no room for mine. But for the sake of our parents and their peace of mind . . .” She stopped to consider. “I came here to try to perhaps frighten Akhilles into releasing your body for ransom; perhaps you would do better than I at that.”

“Do you think he’d be afraid of ghosts? He has killed so many, he must live with them surrounding him at all times,” Hector said, “but I will go and see what I can do. Go back, Sister, back to your own side of that wall which now rises between us, and tell Mother and Father that they should not waste time grieving; they will be with me soon enough. And be certain to tell Andromache not to grieve: I will be waiting here for our son; and tell
him
not to be afraid: I will be ready to greet him. She would not want him to live in the days that are coming now.”

Hector turned away from her and drifted toward the tent of Akhilles. After a moment he turned again, and already, she thought, he looked distant and strange, a man she did not know. “No, do not follow, Sister; our ways part here. Perhaps we may meet again, and understand each other better.”

“Am I not to join you and Troilus, and our mother and father?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “You serve other Gods; I think if you pass death you may go elsewhere. But it is given to me to know that here our ways part, for a long time if not forever. May it always be well with you, Kassandra.” He embraced her, and she was surprised to feel the strength of his embrace. This was no ghost, but as real as she was herself. Then he was gone, even his shadow vanishing on the plain.

TOWARD MORNING the rain stopped, and was replaced by strong winds. Kassandra drifted into and out of sleep, where again and again she dreamed she tried to follow Hector’s ghost toward the tent of Akhilles, where the Akhaian roused to stare and gibber in terror at the sight of Hector walking in and out through the tent walls, laughing at him; or else found herself in Agamemnon’s tent. The King stared wildly up at her and tried to seize her, but she drifted out of his arms as if she were made of mist, and he shouted with rage and lunged after her, howling with frustration.

When at last she woke, faint sunlight was coming through the shutters, and Honey was staring at her in amazement. She wondered if she had been talking or crying out in her sleep. She seldom slept this late, but of course she had been awake till almost dawn. Dressing quickly, she tried to cling with her memory to the messages Hector had told her to give; she knew how quickly, like half-remembered dreams, such experiences faded. She was just tying the belt of her dress when Phyllida ran in.

“Kassandra, come at once; the serpents—”

“I cannot. I have a message to deliver,” Kassandra said. “I trust that you can do whatever needs to be done.”

“But—”

“Well, quickly, then—have they run away or all crawled into their homes?” she demanded, suddenly afraid that this would be the dreaded earthquake warning; it was sure to come soon—only, please the Gods, not today, not today!

“Well, no, but—”

“Then don’t trouble me; I have weighty matters on my mind and cannot stay to talk. Take Honey with you; dress her and give her some breakfast—I’ll come and tend to her when I can,” she said, and ran out of the chamber and down the hill.

As she went downward, she stopped briefly to look over the wall; once again Akhilles’ chariot was circling on the plain, his horses whipped to their greatest speed. The inert bundle of Hector’s body was being dragged behind; yet her Sight was now so clear between worlds that she could see him, a bright shadow standing at the edge of the field, laughing at the foolish thing the Akhaian captain was trying to do. She knew what he found so funny; and as she came down to her parents, standing on the wall in the usual place above the gates, she laughed aloud.

Hecuba’s eyes, almost swollen shut with crying, turned to her angrily.

“How can you laugh?”

“But can’t you see, dearest Mother, how foolish it all is? Look, there in the shadow of the earthworks: Hector is laughing at Akhilles’ foolishness—look at the sun shining on his hair.”

Hecuba gave Kassandra her resigned
But of course, she is mad and cannot be expected to feel anything like a normal person
look, but Kassandra seized her mother’s arms.

“Mother, what I tell you is true; last night I spoke with Hector in the Land Beyond Death, and I tell you all is well with him.”

“You dreamed it, my darling,” said Hecuba gently.

“No, Mother dear, I saw him as I see you, and touched him.”

“I wish I could believe you. . . .” Tears gathered slowly and dropped from the old woman’s eyes.

“Mother, truly, you must believe me! And he said to tell you that you must not grieve—”

“Last night I could almost have believed it—I thought once that I heard Troilus’ voice—”

“You did, Mother, I tell you you did!” Kassandra cried out in excitement, full of her message. “I did not see or speak with Troilus, because Hector said that he stayed with you, trying to comfort you, trying to make you hear him.”

Hecuba said slowly, “When Polyxena and I were too weary to watch longer—already the sun was rising—I stepped into the garden for a moment, and I thought I felt Troilus touch my hair as he did when he grew too tall to kiss me except on the top of the head. He was such a sweet little boy, the dearest of all my sweet boys . . .” Her eyes filled and spilled over again, and Kassandra hugged her mother close.

“He was certainly at your side,” she said; “I swear it to you.”

“And Hector—you say he too is at peace—but how can his spirit be free when we have not his body to give it decent burial and pay honor to his spirit?” Hecuba demanded. “And if it be so, then why have funeral rites been ordained by the Gods?”

“I know only what I have seen, Mother.”

“It is no use,” said Hecuba despairingly, after considering this for a time. “I cannot think of his spirit as free while I see his poor body . . . Look how the dust rises, even after a full night of heavy rain!” she exclaimed, and began to cry again.

Kassandra tried to dry her mother’s tears with her veil, chiding her, “It would break Hector’s heart to see you cry like this. Akhilles cannot hurt him now, whatever he may do. Even if he should cut up Hector’s body and feed it to his dogs, it would not harm the part of Hector we knew, not at all.”

Hecuba cringed and looked sick. “How can you say such things, Kassandra?”

“I am sworn by Apollo to speak the truth; to those who will not hear it I can only say that this does not excuse me from speaking it,” Kassandra replied, wondering why only her mother could make her this angry even—or especially—when she was trying to say nothing that could upset her.

“But here you are saying that we could feed our Hector to the dogs—”

“Mother, I said no such thing!” Kassandra was furious now, but with an effort she kept her voice steady and calm. “You did not hear me aright! I said only that if Akhilles in his madness should do such a thing it would make no difference to Hector, but only to us.”

“But you were saying—I heard you—that we did not need to give him funeral rites,” Hecuba said, and Kassandra sighed as if she were dragging a very heavy weight uphill.

“Mother, I do not think funeral rites matter at all to Hector or to the Gods, but only to us,” she repeated, as if she were trying to explain to Honey why she could not eat a dozen cakes.

Hecuba thrust out her chin. “And I say this is only one of your wild notions,” she said, and turned away.

“Yes, very likely, Mother,” Kassandra said, stifling her rage.
She is old; I cannot expect her to understand anything that is new to her.

“But I beg you to say nothing like that to Andromache, Kassandra; she has already enough grief to bear without that.”

“Without what?” asked Andromache, stepping up to the wall in time to hear the last words.

“I was saying to her,” Kassandra began, and Hecuba flashed an angry
Don’t you dare
glance at her; Kassandra realized that the argument with her mother had made her forget the exact words she had intended to speak.

She said wearily, “Only that in a vision last night I spoke with Hector and he bade you be comforted, because he is content and at peace, whatever they may do to his body.” There was more; Hector had bidden her to say to Andromache—what? That he would come to take his son . . .
but no! I can’t say to her that her son will die, when she has lost Hector too . . . she . . . what was it . . . that she wouldn’t want her son to live in the days that are coming. . . .

Andromache was watching her with arched-brow skepticism; Kassandra said, “He bade me say that—that he would remain to watch over his son.”

“Much good that does either of us,” Andromache said, with the wide-open eyes of suppressed tears, “when he has left us.”

“But he does not want you to cry and grieve,” Kassandra said. “It cannot help him now.”

“Every seer and soothsayer tells us that,” Andromache said, and she sounded bitter. “I had hoped for something better from you, Kassandra, if indeed you can see beyond death.”

“I speak as the God bids me speak in such words as people are willing to hear,” Kassandra said, and turned away. Out on the field, Akhilles went on whipping his horses in an ever more maniacal fury.

All day, as the sun rose and declined over Troy, this went on. Twice Paris led out a party to try to capture Akhilles’ chariot and Hector’s body, and twice the troops of Agamemnon drove them off again; three of Priam’s lesser sons by his palace women were killed, and at last they realized Akhilles was simply too well protected.

“No more,” Priam said after the third attack. “The sun is setting; when it is dark, I will myself go down to Akhilles and try to bargain with him to ransom my son’s body.”

How foolish,
Kassandra thought,
and how useless; Hector is not in that lump of rotting flesh out there tied behind Akhilles and his damned chariot.
Why could she see this when her parents could not? Should they not be wiser than she was? It frightened her that they were not.

She felt ill and faint; she had stood all day by her mother and had not even partaken of the hard bread and oil portioned out to the soldiers at noon. She went and ate a little bread, washing it down with a few sips of watered wine, then went with Hecuba, who was assisting Priam’s body-servants to dress him in his richest robes.

“If I go to Akhilles without robing myself in my finest,” he said, “he may believe I do not think him worthy of honor. I don’t, of course, but I don’t want him to think so.”

“I’m not so sure, Father,” Paris said; he was standing beside his father, trimming his beard meticulously with the scissors Helen used for her tapestry. “Perhaps that madman’s vanity would be more flattered if you went to him robed simply in mourning, as a suppliant.”

“Yet showing him the gold of Troy may arouse his greed if we cannot appeal to his honor,” Andromache said.

“We can hardly appeal to his honor,” said Paris. “It seems obvious to me that he has none. The question is how we can best persuade him to give us Hector for burial.”

“I will go to him as a suppliant,” Priam said. Already he was energetically tearing off his robes. “Bring me the plainest garment I own. Also, I will go to him alone.”

“No!” Hecuba cried, falling to her knees before him in an agony of despair. “We have already seen he has no respect for customary honor, or Hector would even now be in his tomb! If you go within his reach, he will certainly kill you or mistreat you, and perhaps offer the same kind of insult to your corpse that he has offered to Hector’s. You cannot go to him unguarded.”

“If I must, I will go first to our old friend Odysseus, who will bring me safely to Akhilles,” Priam said, “and we know he wants the good opinion of Odysseus; he will offer me no insult in his presence.”

“That’s not enough,” Hecuba declared, clinging tightly to his knees. “If you are bent on this folly you shall not take a single step; for I will not let you go at all.”

Priam tried to shake her loose, but she would not be dislodged. He stood scowling crossly.

“Come, my lady,” he said at last, “what would you have me do, then? If I go to Akhilles with armed men, he will only think I am challenging him to single combat; is that what you want?”

“No!” Hecuba cried, but she refused still to loose her hold.

“Well, then, what do you want me to do? Why can a woman never be reasonable?” Priam demanded.

“I don’t know, my lord and my love; but you’re not going down to that madman alone!”

“Let
me
go,” said Andromache with quiet dignity. “Let him explain to Hector’s widow and to his child why he will not ransom him.”

“Oh, my dear—” Priam began, but Hecuba started up in indignation.

“If you think I’d let you take my grandson within a league of that fiend—”

“A better thought,” Helen said: “take a priest—if only as a witness before the Gods; Akhilles fears the Gods—”

“Better yet,” said Priam, “I will take two priestesses, Kassandra and Polyxena. One serves Apollo and one the Maiden, so whichever Immortal Akhilles fears may witness his impiety.”

He turned to Kassandra and said, “You are not afraid to go with your old father into Akhilles’ presence, are you, girl?”