Creusa's baby, still small enough to be tied in her shawl, was slung over her shoulders; Polyxena led the group of Priam's daughters, all wearing the traditional beribboned festival tunic of maidens, their long curls floating in the breeze. They saw Kassandra and waved to her, and she did not feel churlish enough to refuse to return the greeting. If they would not postpone the festival or hold it quietly, in a way that would not attract the catastrophe she had foreseen, they might as well enjoy themselves while they could. Up the hill someone had started the first of the planting songs:
Bring the grain, by the winter hidden,
Bring it with songs and feasting and joy…
Other women took up the song. Kassandra heard Creusa's strong, sweet voice; then the other women took up the refrain, but when she tried to sing she felt choked, and her own voice would not carry.
"Look," said Oenone, pointing,"the men are on the wall watching us. There is your father, my precious," she said, pointing and trying to attract the attention of the child to where Paris stood in his bright armor, the pale early sunlight reflecting off it in arrow-like rays.
The child twisted in Kassandra's arms, trying to see what his mother was pointing at; he was heavy enough to throw Kassandra off balance, so that she nearly fell.
"I had better take him," said Oenone, and Kassandra did not protest. She could see the crimson plumes that surrounded Hector's helmet, Priam's brilliant armor, and Aeneas, taller than any of the other men.
They had now reached the fields; the ground had been prepared days before. The women stooped and took off their sandals, for no shod foot might tread the breasts of Earth Mother in this rite. Hecuba wore a scarlet robe; she raised her hands for the invocation, then paused and gestured to Andromache; the younger woman, in her brilliant scarlet gown from Colchis, came forward to take her place.
Kassandra understood; Hecuba was an old woman, and although she had borne seventeen children, of whom more than half had survived their fifth year - a splendid sign of Earth Mother's favour - she was now passing beyond the years of childbearing, and this rite must be performed by a fertile woman, a mother. For the last years it had not mattered so much, but now, when this year's grain was crucial to the survival of the city, no chance could be taken that a woman barren with age might affront Earth Mother by her presence in the greatest of rites.
Andromache gestured, and all maidens and virgins, as well as every woman who had never borne a living child, left the ploughed acres. Kassandra nodded farewell to Oenone and moved toward the small stone fences and grown-over hedges of thorn and rank bushes at the edge of the field. They were far from barren; she could hear concealed within them the sound of small insects, crickets and beetles, and many herbs and plants whose uses she was beginning to know grew at the margin of the ploughed fields. She observed a narrow leaf good for curing rashes on the skin of children and small animals; she stooped to cut it, murmuring a whispered prayer to the Goddess for this bounty even outside the lands given to her grace.
Now that the women were in the fields, the men were coming down; King Priam, the father of his people, in his richly dyed crimson loincloth, naked otherwise except for a string of purple stones round his neck, took the wooden plough between his hands and raised it high in the air; the cheer that went up was deafening. With his own hands he yoked a white donkey to the shafts of the plough; Kassandra knew that this animal had been chosen from all the beasts in Troy for the king's ploughing because it was without blemish and the owner had been highly paid.
Priam dug the ploughshare into the field, and again a cheer arose as the dark brown strip of fertile loam appeared between the pale sun-dried surface of the earth. The women's voices now lifted in a new song. When Kassandra was quite a little girl she had been told that the songs were to drown the cries of Mother Earth at being thus ravished. During her sojourn with the Amazons Kassandra had been taught a more sophisticated theory: that Earth Mother gave food to her children of her free will and the songs were only praise and thanksgiving; but even now she had to repress a shudder as the plough broke through the soil.
Now all the fertile women of the city burst on to the field; all together they stripped off their upper garments, exposing their breasts, and made symbolic gestures of stripping their milk into the waiting land, to nourish the fields. Over half of them were pregnant, from young girls just swelling with their first babies, their breasts no larger than green peaches, to women Hecuba's age who had borne a child every year or so for a generation, their long flabby breasts bared to the sky and sun.
Kassandra joined in the cry which rose to heaven:
"Earth Mother, nourish your children, we cry to you…'
The baskets of seed were passed to all the fertile women, and they began passing them down the field, scattering the grain. Priam was shoved in rude haste to the edge of the field; he stumbled and measured his length on the soil, staining his robe. There were gasps at this evil omen and he was picked up and borne off tenderly to where the rest of the men were surrounding the field now, watching the sowing. The sun was high, beating down with dazzling force.
"Maybe the Earth would bear no matter what we do or don't do," a big rough man Kassandra had never seen before suggested. "I been in heathen places where they know nothing of our Gods, and crops grow there, too, just the same as here."
"You be quiet, Ajax; we don't need any of your foolish ideas," said a strong deep voice Kassandra identified as Aeneas's.
"Whether it has to do with the Gods or not, this is the way things are done for decency and custom, and why not?"
Thunder rumbled in the distance; and clouds moved across the face of the sun. Kassandra felt the insects in the hedges grow silent. Then a few drops of rain rattled against the dry branches of the hedges, and within moments the flimsy garments of the women were flattened against their bodies. They sent up a cry:
"Thanks be to Earth Mother who sends rain to nourish us!"
The songs had quieted as the rain grew hard. Now the women finished sowing the last of the seed and everyone, including the little girls and the women who were old and barren, ran out on the field to assist in covering the last of the grain. Kassandra started to run and join Oenone when a dark surge came before her eyes and she paused, dizzy, not sure that the ground had not rocked beneath her feet.
There there was a war cry and she saw men in dark tunics rushing out on the field, shouting and yelling. A man in armor seized Oenone and, flinging her over his shoulder, rushed for the dark line of ships that had appeared while all eyes were on the ploughing and sowing.
By old custom, the Trojans had brought no weapons into the field; most of them were running for the city wall where they had left their weapons. Paris was one of the first to reappear on the wall, shooting arrow after arrow into the throng of strange soldiers. The man who held Oenone fell struggling, struck through the heart, and Oenone freed herself. There were many arrow and javelin shots, and many of the Akhaians fell; most of the others dropped the women they had seized and managed to reach the ships before the hailstorm of arrows cut them down. Oenone reached Hecuba's side and looked round for her child; finding him safe, she joined the small central knot of women around the Queen. Kassandra was still in the protection of the hedge. She saw Helen beside Oenone, and wondered what, if anything, Paris's two wives found to say to one another. She noted too, that Helen's shapely body was obviously swelling in pregnancy also.
She wondered if Menelaus had seen. If so, surely Menelaus would now rather go home and leave Helen to Paris—he would not keep fighting for the mother of some other man's child.