Whenever Kassandra heard anyone say such a thing as Women cannot… she was always eager to do just that very thing. She said, "But I am about to travel at the will of my God; and if you wanted to come with me, Helen, I would willingly have your company."
"And I yours; but again, I cannot leave so young a child," Helen said. ""Where do you go and why?"
"To Colchis; to seek Queen Imandra and ask of her serpent-lore," Kassandra said. "A moon past, our serpents died or fled from us; I do not want to replace them until I am sure that nothing I did or failed to do was responsible…'
She told the story, and Andromache looked wistful.
"Bear my greetings to my mother; and tell her I am happily wed and that I have Hector's son."
"Why not come and bring her your own greetings? Your son is old enough to leave with Hecuba and his father."
"I wish I could," Andromache said. "If you had told me this a month ago - but I am pregnant again. Perhaps this time it will be a daughter who can be a warrior for Troy."
"A warrior?"
"Why not? You are, Kassandra, and your mother before you."
"Did you not hear what Paris said, when last I would have borne my bow to the walls?" Kassandra asked in disgust. "I could shoot now—and kill Akhilles - and end this war without sending Helen forth from us. But this would not please the men; they do not want to end this war—"
"No," said Andromache,"they want to win it; Hector has reserved Akhilles for himself and will never agree to any other way to end the fighting. Can you tell me when this will happen and how much longer must we fight?"
Kassandra smiled wryly. "Hector has forbidden me to prophesy doom," she said, "and believe me, I have nothing else to tell."
"Perhaps it is as well you are travelling to Colchis," Helen said. "Kassandra, my friend, the Gods have spoken to me as well as to you, and they have spoken to me nothing of disaster."
"Then may your Gods speak truth and mine be false," Kassandra said. "Nothing would please me more than to return and find Akhilles dead at Hector's hand, and all of them gone away again."
But it will not, it cannot be so…
CHAPTER 13
Kassandra had believed that once she made the decision to travel to Colchis it would be a simple matter of getting leave of the chief priest and priestess, gathering together the clothing she wished to take with her, choosing a travelling companion (or perhaps two) and setting forth.
But it was not nearly so easy as that. She was reminded that there was officially a state of war between the Akhaians and Troy, so that it must be arranged (by lengthy messages sent back and forth from one Temple of Apollo to the next) that she should travel under the Peace of Apollo, being a woman and a sworn priestess and having nothing to do with the war on either side; and she was given to understand that this was more difficult because she was Priam's daughter and closely related to the main combatants of the war. Long before the official safe-conducts and permissions could be arranged Kassandra was heartily sick of the whole idea and wished she had never thought of it. In the end she swore a sacred oath by every God she had ever heard of (and some she hadn't) that she would deliver no messages relating to the war from either party, and she was declared an official messenger of Apollo and permitted to travel wherever she wished.
Khryse wished to travel with her, and she had some sympathy for him; he was still mourning the fate of his daughter in the Greek camp, and knowing that Agamemnon had chosen the girl for his own mistress did not help. However, though he swore to her that he would respect her virginity as if she were his own child, she did not trust even his oath, and refused to have him in her party. Since he was a highly respected priest of Apollo, it seemed for a time that they would not allow her to travel without his escort; but she finally appealed to Charis, saying she would remain within walls till her hair turned grey rather than travel a single step in his company; and at last the matter was dropped.
Then Priam wished to send messages to many friends along her path, and she had to swear that they were family matters, or religious matters with nothing to do with the war; she could see reason in this because often travellers under religious immunities had taken advantage of this for spying on one side or the other. And finally her mother refused to allow her to travel without adequate chaperonage, so that in the end Kassandra, who would have preferred to travel alone or with a single companion, preferably an Amazon rider like Penthesilea, had to accept two of her mother's oldest and most timid waiting-women, and to promise that on the road she would always share her bed with one or the other of them.
"What can she be thinking of?" she asked herself, "If I wished to indulge myself in lechery, I would certainly not wish to travel to the ends of the world and do so on the hard ground after a day's riding when I could just as easily do so in my own bed."
But she knew it was her mother's way, and there was really nothing she could do about it; and so she accepted Hecuba's choice of women.
"For if I refuse," she said to Phyllida when at last it finally seemed that all the obstacles had been cleared and she would set forth the next day,"she will believe that I wish somehow to escape her supervision; and she cannot think of any reason I might wish to do so unless I wish to misbehave myself in one way or the other. What is it in women that makes them suspect such things of one another, Phyllida?"
Phyllida sighed. "Experience, I suspect," she said. "Did you not tell me that you had Chryseis watched night and day and still could not vouch for her innocence?"
Kassandra knew that was true; but it made her angry. She remembered Star saying that city women were so lecherous that they must be locked up behind walls.
Women, Kassandra thought - except the Amazons - spend their time sitting about and thinking about whom they love, only because they have nothing else to occupy their minds. If they had a flock of sheep or a herd of horses to tend they would be better off. But that had not saved Oenone from pining, she realized, when Paris deserted her.
She lay awake much of that last night thinking about this mysterious emotion which transformed otherwise sensible women into halfwits capable of thinking only of the men who had inspired them to love.
It had been determined that she should depart at daybreak; she rose as soon as light began to appear in the sky, and breakfasted on a little bread and a cup of watered wine. She had hoped to ride on a swift horse, but her companions were too old and staid for that, so she had chosen a sedate elderly donkey and to have the older women carried in chairs. Her chair-bearers and attendants—almost guards—were strong young servants of Apollo's Temple.
She had expected to slip quietly away; but as she approached the gates she saw a little group of people gathered there; Khryse, Phyllida, and a few others who wished to bid her goodbye.
Phyllida embraced and kissed her and wished her a pleasant journey and a safe return; Khryse came and embraced her too, • rather against Kassandra's will.
"Come back to us soon and safely, my dear," he murmured with his lips close to her ear. "I shall miss you more than I can say. Say that you will miss me too."
She thought, I shall miss you as I would miss a toothache, but was too courteous to say so. "May the Gods keep you safe and bring Chryseis back to you," she said, thinking that she did not wish him ill, but she would like it if he would find himself a wife and stop troubling her. Then she clucked to her donkey and they rode forth.
Before leaving the coast they had to pass the Greek ships; here would Apollo's truce first be tested.