"So you are still at your old game of playing with serpents! I should have remembered."
Honey, seeing the snake, began to cry and reach out her hands for it. Kassandra, laughing, allowed the little girl to wind it about her waist. Andromache shrank away with a glance of revulsion, but the child's delight in the snake was unmistakable.
"Why not get her a kitten, Kassandra?" Hecuba suggested. "It would be an altogether more seemly pet."
Kassandra laughed. "She is content with such pets as I give her; you should see her with our very matriarch of serpents - the one who is almost as big around as she is."
"Are you not afraid—snakes have not very good eyesight - the snake will make a mistake and swallow her by misadventure?" Andromache protested.
But Kassandra said, "They know their own; Honey has fed her with doves and rabbits. But Mother, this is not a proper subject for your rooms."
Hecuba asked, laughing, "The snake—or the baby?"
"Both," Kassandra replied, hugging her mother again. "Let me call someone to take her away for a bath and clean clothing. She will be prettier then and besides, she has had nothing to eat since early morning." Then, with a glance at Hecuba for permission, Kassandra summoned a servant to take child and snake to the house of the Sunlord.
"I too should present myself there soon, I fear," she said, "although I am sure they would gladly give me leave to pay my respects to my mother and to my family. And I would like to see Helen's sons," she added.
"Ah, Helen's sons," Hecuba said dryly. "There are jokes in the Akhaian army that Helen is raising up an army for Troy."
"As I cannot for Hector," said Andromache and her eyes were full of tears. "But that Akhaian woman, no sooner has she whelped than she is in pup again."
"What a thing to say," Hecuba protested. "You had back luck, that is all. You have borne Hector a fine son—and every man in the army knows his name and admires him. What more do you want?"
"Nothing," Andromache said, "and just between us women, I am glad enough to be spared the business of bearing every year or two; I told Hector that if he wishes for fifty sons like his father, he must get them as his father does. But so far he wishes only to share my bed and even refused one of the captured Akhaian women. Perhaps I am not as fond of children as Helen, but I would like to have a daughter before I am too old. And speaking of daughters, Kassandra, did you know that Creusa had named her second daughter "Kassandra"?"
"No, that I had not heard," Kassandra said, and wondered if it were Creusa's doing or that of Aeneas.
"And now before you go," said Andromache,"tell me of my mother."
Kassandra told Andromache of the birth of the heir to Colchis; and Andromache sighed.
"I wish that I might go to Colchis so that Hector might be the King there; perhaps when this wretched war is over that can be arranged."
"Imandra feels that her little pearl princess will be reared to be Queen," Kassandra said. "And Hector would not be content to sit at the foot of the throne, as your mother's consort does, and amuse himself with hunting and fishing with his companions."
Andromache sighed.
"Perhaps not; but he would get used to it, I suppose, as I have got used to keeping indoors and spinning until my fingers are sore," she said restlessly. "Now that you have returned, Kassandra, perhaps we can manage some excursions outside the walls…'
"If the Akhaians allow it—"
"Or if they get tired of sitting outside the walls and throwing rocks at the guards," Andromache said. "That is about all they have accomplished in the last few months; though once or twice they have tried to storm the walls, and even brought-extra-long ladders. But Hector had the idea of emptying the big soup kettle boiling for the guards' dinner over their heads, and they went down a great deal faster than they had come up, I assure you." She laughed heartily. "Now they always keep a great kettle of something boiling up there, and if it is something no worse than soup, the assailants are lucky. Last time it was oil, and they have not tried again since then; ai, the screams we heard that night from the Akhaian camp! All their healer-priests were out chanting, and sacrificing to Apollo until past dawn. That will teach them to come sneaking up the wall when they thought all the guards were sleeping!"
"You do not bear weapons now—but you have not lost your taste for warfare," Kassandra commented.
"I have a child to protect." Andromache replied, and Kassandra remembered that she herself had indeed been ready to kill when the soldiers threatened Honey.
"And I many children; but they are all of an age to fight for themselves," Hecuba said. "And now, Kassandra, tell me; when you passed through the country of the Amazons, did you encounter our kinswoman? And had Penthesilea any message for me?"
"I saw her only on the outward journey," Kassandra said, and told her mother about the meeting with the Amazons, and how many of the women had chosen to settle into villages with men. Then, more troubled, she told about the starving Kentaurs on the return journey, and that she saw no sign of any women of the tribes.
"May the Goddess be with her," said Hecuba fervently. "I have no sense that she is dead; and I think I might know. We have always been as close as if we were twins; but she is four years younger than I. It is not beyond all possibility that one day we may see her in Troy."
"May that day be far," Kassandra said, "for she told me that if the war went desperately against us, she would come and end her days in Troy." And with a curious flicker of light, as if the sun went behind a cloud, she saw Penthesilea riding through the gates of Troy… in triumph, or in defeat? She could not tell; the vision was gone, and they spoke of other things.
At last she rose and stretched herself. "I sit like any old gossip among women," she said, "and I have duties awaiting me in the Sunlord's house. But it has been good to gossip and be idle—" and, she thought, to talk of women's matters like the raising of children. She had once thought it must be very boring, but since having a child of her own, she began to understand that such woman's talk could be absorbing. But to speak of nothing else for a lifetime…
"It is not every day that you return from a journey of such length," Andromache said. "Helen will want to see you, and show you her babes - and Creusa to show you your namesake. She is more like Polyxena, with red hair and blue eyes—and as pretty as if Aphrodite had laid the gift of beauty in her cradle. She will marry a prince, if this war leaves any of us alive to think about marriages."
"I think no one will ever call my little one beautiful," Kassandra said, "but to a mother I suppose even the plainest children are lovely. In any case I intend, if the Gods are kind, to send her to Penthesilea to be brought up a warrior. I still wish I might have been."
"Oh, you cannot mean that, Kassandra," said Hecuba, coming to embrace her in farewell.
"Can I not? Mother, if anything of Imandra's gifts has survived the Akhaians, I will send them to you as quickly as the cart can be unloaded," she said, and took her leave. Andromache said she would walk with her a little way.
"For I get out so seldom, and Hector is always very troubled if I go out alone; but he cannot refuse me the chaperonage of my own husband's sister," she said discontentedly. "I often walk with Helen, but she did not come down today: Paris took a small wound in the last fight; nothing to worry him, but enough to give him a good excuse to stay indoors and be cosseted. Otherwise I am sure she would have come to greet you."
A few steps afterwards they parted, Andromache to return to the palace and Kassandra turning up to the Sunlord's high house.