"Kassandra, my dearest! What ails you?"
Kassandra, jolted out of the nightmare but not yet fully aware of what was happening or where she was, could only stare, unable to speak.
"Sister, you are exhausted, you have been too long in the sun," Andromache said. She put her arms around Kassandra and led her into the cool, shadowed room.
"Oh, if it were only no worse than that," Kassandra gasped as Andromache pushed her down on a bench with soft cushions, and held a cool cup of water to her lips. "Don't you think I would rather believe myself mad, or sun-smitten, if it meant I need not see what I have seen?"
"I believe you," Andromache said. "I do not think you mad: but I do not believe your visions either."
"Do you think I would invent such a thing? How wicked you must think me!" Kassandra cried out indignantly. Andromache held her close in an affectionate embrace.
"No, sister; I believe that the Gods have tormented you with false visions," she said. "No one could believe you malicious enough to pretend such things. But, my dear, listen to reason. Our city is strong and well defended; we have no lack of warriors or weapons, or if it came to that, of allies; if the Akhaians should be fools enough to come chasing after this bitch in heat instead of saying "good riddance to a very nasty piece of rubbish", why should you think they would not get more of Troy than they ever bargained for?"
Kassandra could see the good sense in that; but she moaned, clutching at her heart.
"Yes, Hector said something like that—" she murmured, "but—" she heard herself crying again, "it is the Immortals who are angry with us." She fought desperately to bring herself up out of the dark waters.
"At least you know she is no more than a bitch in heat," she said at last.
"Oh yes; I saw the looks she cast on Hector and even on your father," Andromache said. "And it may well be that she is a curse sent to our city by one of the Immortals; but if it is their will we cannot avoid it."
Kassandra rocked to and fro in misery; Andromache's quiet words and acceptance filled her with despair.
"Do you truly believe that the Gods would stoop to fight against a mortal city? What reason could they have? We are not wicked or impious - we have not angered any God."
"Perhaps," said Andromache,"the Gods do not need reasons for what they do."
"If the Gods are not just," Kassandra said, weeping, "what hope is there for us?"
As if in a blaze she saw the face of the Beautiful One, the Goddess who had tempted Paris successfully.
I will give you the most beautiful woman in the world—
As she had thought then, she thought again: But he already has a woman…
She raised her face to Andromache.
"Where did Oenone go?"
"I did not see; I thought perhaps she went to care for her child—"
"No; she saw Paris with Helen and ran away," Kassandra said. "I will go to her."
"I cannot see why Paris would desert her even for Helen, beautiful as she is," said Andromache. "Unless some Goddess has ordained it."
"Such an unjust Goddess I would never serve," Kassandra said bitterly.
Andromache covered her hands with her ears. "Oh, don't say that," she implored. "That is blasphemy; we are all subject to the Immortals—"
Kassandra raised the unfinished cup and drained it; but her hands were shaking and she almost dropped it.
"I will go and speak with Oenone," she said, rising.
"Yes," Andromache urged, "go and tell her we love her and we will never accept that Spartan in her place, were she Aphrodite herself."
Though Kassandra searched the palace everywhere, Oenone was nowhere to be found; nor was she ever again seen in Priam's house. At last, hearing the royal party on the stairs - making ready, she thought, to solemnize Paris's wedding - which, since Oenone was not there to protest it, could not be prevented -Kassandra left the palace and returned quietly to the Sunlord's house. She had no wish to hear wedding hymns sung for Helen when they had been denied Oenone. She would have been willing to rebuke them in the name of any God if a God had spoken to her, but nothing happened, and she had no wish to make a further spectacle of herself crying out the death and disaster that she could not help but see.
VOLUME TWO: Aphrodite's Gift
CHAPTER 1
Kassandra spoke to no one, either in the Sunlord's house or elsewhere, of Helen or Paris; but she should have known that such news would never be kept silent; before three days had elapsed, Helen's story, and Kassandra's prophecy, were on every tongue in Troy.
There were even those who, seeing Helen's beauty, believed, or said they believed, that the Akhaian Goddess of Love and Beauty, Aphrodite, had come herself to the city. Kassandra, if asked about this, said only that Helen was indeed very beautiful—beautiful enough to turn the head of any mortal man—and that in her own country she was believed to have been fathered by an Immortal.
She did not know or care whether anyone believed this; her own worry was now for Oenone. She hoped that the girl had simply taken her child and returned to the Temple of Scamander; but she did not believe it. At the back of her mind was the haunting fear that Oenone had somehow chosen to sacrifice herself and her son to the River God. If Aphrodite was indeed a Goddess of Love, why had she not chosen to guard the love between Oenone and Paris?
She wondered about this Goddess Aphrodite, who put such temptation into the hearts of men - and women too; it was not only that Paris had chosen and could not resist Helen, but Helen too, though Queen of Sparta by Mother-right, had chosen to give herself to Paris—after having chosen her husband, as few women in the Akhaian world could do. If I were Queen, she thought, I should choose to be like Imandra and reign alone, taking no consort.
The Goddesses of Troy and of Colchis were sensible Goddesses, who acknowledged the primacy of the Earth and of Motherhood; but this Goddess who disrupted all things for a whim they called Love—no, this was no Goddess she could ever consent to serve. And then one night she dreamed she stood in a strange Temple before the Akhaian Goddess who looked very much like the Spartan Queen.
So you have sworn you will not serve me, Kassandra of Troy? Yet you have given your life to the service of the Immortals—
Kassandra half knew that she was dreaming; she looked up toward the Goddess and saw that she was even more beautiful than the Spartan Helen. And for a moment it seemed that in Aphrodite's face was the half forgotten beauty of the vision of Apollo Sunlord: could she resist the call of that love?
"I am sworn to serve the Mother of All," she said. "You are not she, and you have no part in her worship; for you are denying her, I think."
Faraway laughter sounded like a chiming of bells.
You too will serve me in the end, Priam's daughter. I have more power than you, and more than the ordinary Goddesses of your cities. All women here shall worship me, and you too.
Kassandra cried out 'No!" and woke with a start, to find her room empty and only the bright face of the sun at her window, like a mockery of the beauty she had seen.
How strange these Akhaians were; first they chose to worship a goddess of marriage who would punish any woman for straying outside it; and then they chose a goddess of passionate love, who would tempt a woman to forsake the vows she had sworn. It was as if the Akhaians both feared and desired faithlessness in their wives—or perhaps they only wished an excuse for abandoning their own wives.