"No; if I had been there I would have said, dress it with wine and sweet oil; and sometimes I have known a poultice of mouldy bread, or of cobwebs, to cleanse a puncture wound," she said. "The healers are too quick with their hot irons; I might have cut it last night to make it bleed more freely, but nothing more. Now it is too late. The infection has taken hold, and either he will live or he will die. But don't despair," she added quickly. "He is young and strong, and as I told you, I have seen worse wounds heal."
Is there nothing that can be done?" Helen asked wildly. "Your magic—"
"Alas, I have no healing magic," Kassandra said. "But I will pray; I can do no more." She hesitated and said, "The river priestess Oenone, she was skilled in healing magic."
Helen sprang up in excitement.
"Can you not send for her?" she implored. "Beg her to come and heal my lord! Whatever she asks, it shall be hers; I promise it."
But the only thing she wishes for, you have already taken from her, Kassandra thought. She said, "I will send a message to her; but I cannot promise that she will come."
"But if she loved him once, could she be cruel enough to refuse him her help, if it meant his death?"
"I don't know, Helen; she was very bitter against him when she left the palace," Kassandra said.
"If I must, I - Queen of Sparta - will kneel before her with ashes in my hair," Helen said. "Should I go to Oenone, then?"
"No; I know her, I will go," Kassandra said. "You pray and sacrifice to Aphrodite, who favours you." Helen embraced her, and clung to her.
"Kassandra, surely you do not wish me evil? So many of these women of Troy hate me - I can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices—" Helen's voice sounded almost like a pleading child's, and Kassandra touched her cheek gently.
"I wish you nothing but good, Helen; that I swear to you," she said.
"But when first I came to Troy you cursed me—"
"No," Kassandra said. "I foretold truly that you would bring sorrow on us. Because I saw the evil, it does not mean that I caused it. It was the doing of the Immortals, and no more of your doing than mine. No one can escape the working of fate. Now I will go to the headwaters of the Scamander and find Oenone, and implore her to come and heal Paris," Kassandra said.
Khryse greeted her as she left the palace. She looked at him in surprise; this morning she had forgotten, and simply taken his presence for granted.
"I thought by now you would be on a ship bound for Crete or Egypt," she said. "Why have you not gone?"
"There may still be something I can do for the city which has sheltered me, or for Priam who has been my King," Khryse said, "or, who knows, even for you."
"You should not stay for me," she said. "I would be glad to know you are safe from what will come."
"I want nothing," he said in a queerly sober tone, "except that you should know at last, before the end comes for us all, that my love for you is true and unselfish, desiring nothing except your good."
Why, that's true, she thought, and said gently, "I believe you, my friend, and I beg you to go to safety as soon as you can. Someone must remember and tell the truth about Troy for those who come after; it troubles me that in legends, our children's children should come to think of Akhilles as a great hero or a good man."
"It is not likely to do us any harm, or Akhilles any good either, whatever they may say or sing of us in times to come," Khryse said. "Yet if I survive I swear I will tell the truth to anyone who will listen."
Kassandra climbed quickly to the Sunlord's house and took off her formal robe; she put on an old dark tunic, in which she could come and go unheeded, solid leather sandals, and a heavy cloak which would keep off wind or rain. Then she went quietly out of the small abandoned side gate and took the road up toward Mount Ida, along the drying stream of the Scamander. The track was beaten now into a road; many horses and men had come this way and the water which had once run strong and clean was muddied and fouled. When last she had taken this path - how many years ago now?—the water had been clear, the path almost untrodden.
Even now, had her errand been less urgent and desperate, she would have enjoyed the journey; the sun was hidden by clouds, the tops of the tree-clad hills lost themselves in thick rolls of mist and the light winds promised rain and probably thunder. She went up quickly; but although she was a strong woman, the gradient was so steep that she was soon out of breath and had to stop and rest. As she climbed, what had been a river ran clearer here, and no man nor horse had polluted the pathway or the water. She knelt and drank, for in spite of the clouds and wind, it was hot.
At last she reached the place where the water sprang forth from the rock guarded by a carved image of Father Scamander. She struck the bell which summoned the river priestesses, and when a young girl appeared, asked if she might speak with Oenone.
"I think she is here," the girl said. "Her son was ill with a summer fever; she did not go down to the sheep-shearing festival with the others."
Kassandra had forgotten that it was so near to shearing-time.
The child went away, and Kassandra sat down on a bench near the spring and enjoyed the silence; perhaps when Honey was older she might come here to serve among the priestesses of the River God. A pleasant place for a young girl to grow up -not perhaps as pleasant as riding with the Amazons, but that was no longer possible. She began to understand that she had hardly begun yet to feel her grief for Penthesilea. She had been so busy with vengeance and then with other deaths that her grief had had to stand aside for more leisure to mourn.
It will be a long time before I can mourn for my brother, she thought, and wondered what she had meant by it.
She heard a step behind her and turned; at first she hardly recognized Oenone. The slender young girl had become a tall and heavy woman, deep-breasted, her dark curls coiled low on her neck. Only the deep-set eyes were the same, but even so Kassandra hesitated when she spoke the name.
"Oenone? I hardly recognized you—"
"No," Oenone said. "None of us are as young and pretty as we once were. It's the princess, is it not - Kassandra?"
"Yes," she said. "I suppose I have changed too."
"You have," Oenone said,"though you are still beautiful, Princess."
Kassandra smiled faintly. She said, "How is my brother's son? They told me he has been ill—"
"Oh, nothing serious, just one of those little disorders that come to children in the summer. He will be recovered in a day or two. But how may I serve you, Lady?"
"It is not for me," Kassandra said, "but my brother Paris. He lies dying of an arrow-wound and you have such skill in healing - will you come?"
Oenone raised her eyebrows. At last she said, "Lady Kassandra, your brother died, for me, on the day when I left the palace and he spoke not one word to acknowledge his son. All these years, for me, he has been dead. I have no wish now to bring him back to life."
Kassandra knew in her heart that she should have anticipated this answer; that she had had no right to come here and ask anything of Oenone. She bowed her head and rose.
"I can understand your bitterness," she said, "and yet - he is certainly dying - can your anger be still so great? In the face of death?"
"Death? Do you not think it was like death for me, to be sent forth without a word, as if I were a penny harlot in the streets of Troy? And all those years not a word to his son—no, Kassandra, you ask if my anger is so great? You have not begun to know anything about my anger, and I do not think you want to know. Go back to your palace, and mourn your brother as I mourned him all these years." Her voice softened. "My anger is not for you, Lady, you were always kind to me and so was your mother."
"If you will not come for Paris's sake, or for mine," Kassandra pleaded, "will you not come for my mother's sake? She has lost so many of her sons—" her voice broke and she bit her tongue hard, not wishing to weep before Oenone.