Electra (24 page)

'He fares well, fat and sleepy,' said Menon. 'He lives on a small farm near to the temple of Epidavros, where he has friends. Diomenes called Chryse left there recently, with the female healer and his friend the Trojan sailor.'

'Where were they going?' I asked, remembering Cassandra. She had been kind to me when I was distracted and mannerless, and I hoped that she did not detest my name and memory. I recalled the smile of the asclepid, too, and was even prepared to forgive his dark scoundrel of a friend.

'They were well and happy together. They were going to Kenchraie to build a ship. Odysseus is still missing. They sighted his vessel from afar, driven before great winds, in the height of the summer; but no word of him has come to Ithaca, where Penelope, his wife, walks a delicate line between suitors and civil war. The drought has been bad there, and most of the barley crop in the Peloponnese has failed. It will be a hard winter in the Argolid.'

Menon plucked at the lyre, flexing his fingers, and played a tinkling tune.

Joy comes rarely, flighty maiden,

Dances in on butterfly wings,

Can't rest for a moment and flies away.

But her sister, Woe, is a devoted damsel,

She comes to stay, and brings her spindle.

He added,
'And a whole bale of wool!'
with such a doleful face that we all laughed. 'What shall I play, Lord?' he asked Pylades. 'Shall I sing of Troy and heroes for my most generous host?'

'No,' said Pylades instantly. 'Not wars and battles. Sing us a love song. If you please.'

Menon strummed for a while, adjusting a tuning peg, and sang of the maiden Psyche, beloved of the God Eros, son of Aphrodite. The God takes her to his beautiful palace, and only one promise is asked of her; not to hope to see him. Invisible hands caress her, an invisible mouth touches hers. She is altogether in love with him.

Warm in the darkness, flanks are aligned,

Warm in the darkness, mouth kisses mouth,

Sweet is the darkness to Psyche the nymph,

Weary the long day, waiting for night.

Then her jealous sisters nagged at the poor girl for not knowing what her husband looked like. Finally, greatly daring, she lit an oil lamp and looked at the sleeping man who shared her bed. He was as beautiful as a God should be; she fell in love with him all over again as soon as she saw the long black, smooth thighs, the clever hands which caressed her, the smooth chin and soft mouth, and curly hair.

But she spilled hot oil on him and he did not even wake as she vanished. She had broken her promise, and she was gone.

Then we followed Psyche on her long, long travail, trying to find Eros her husband, with his raging mother blocking every path, teasing and tormenting her.

Demeter, Mother of all, revenge me.

My son has taken a mortal to wife,

A country girl, impudent and frail.

Revenge my son's wrongs and my own!

But the other goddesses would not help Aphrodite hurt Psyche. The young woman, far gone in pregnancy, cried on the Great Mother, but Demeter dismissed her prayer. She prayed to Hera, wife of Zeus the Father, and she also rejected her.

But when her wanderings brought Psyche near the abode of Aphrodite, the vengeful Stranger let her in, determined to kill her, and the unborn grandchild she carried. The Goddess poured a pile of wheat onto the floor, beans and vetch and spelt and millet and poppy-seeds, and required Psyche to sort them into separate heaps by nightfall.

The ants came to Psyche in her despair, and for pity completed her task. But that was not enough for Aphrodite. She dragged the girl to the window and said, 'There are man-eating sheep with golden fleece in that meadow. Bring me a skein of golden wool, and you may live to bear your child.'

Father Pan's reed whispered to despondent Psyche as she walked, weeping, through the meadow. 'They are fierce in the sun, but they sleep in the evening. Go down then, maiden, and gather their wool off the briars.'

But the golden skein did not assuage a Goddess' wrath.

Look to the height, maiden,

That is Aroanius, whence springs Styx.

If you climb to the summit and bring to me

In a crystal dish the ice-cold waters,

The heart of Hades river; I may let you live.

It was an impossible task. She plodded, great with child, towards the lower slopes, hoping to die quickly by falling. But an eagle snatched the dish from her hands and returned with it, and she brought the icy waters of death's river to Aphrodite.

Eros, meanwhile, had fallen at Zeus' feet, begging for his beautiful wife and his unborn child. Zeus could deny Eros nothing, so called Hermes to catch up the maiden and bring her to Parnassus. There he gave her a cup of nectar, making her immortal.

She drank the honeyed wine.

Still wet on her lips, she was gathered

Into the visible embrace, the familiar arms

And Eros kissed nectar from the mouth of Psyche,

Who had dared great dangers for his love.

The song finished and the bard stretched and yawned. Pylades led him to a bath and a much-deserved rest. I wondered what it would be like to love someone enough to scale a mountain for them, and what it would be like to cherish caresses in the darkness.

Winter came. We had ploughed the fields in late autumn, when the Pleiades and Hyades had followed Orion below the horizon. The beasts were stalled, the harvest done, the seed grain selected, dried, and stored in pithoi sunk in the farmhouse floor. I looked out of the shutters on a day of sleety winds and a sky presaging snow, and saw Pylades and Orestes trudging out to tend the beasts.

They were warm in my weaving, in my triple woven tunics and leggings, in my well-sewn, pieced skin cloaks and heavy oxhide boots. I felt proud.

The journey to Troas was much faster than I had imagined. The boat, called
Waverider
by our sailor, wallowed a little and depended much more on sails than on oars, though she could be rowed; and was, by a well-paid crew of sweating oarsmen.

We skipped along from Skiathos to Skiros, then dived across the Aegean in two days, striking Lemnos and catching the rare, beneficent wind that held back the spilling Hellespont and propelled us into the Bay of Troy.

We saw it from the sea and wailed for grief. I had not seen the final ruin of the city, nor had my companions. Troy was gone. Where the solid wall rose from the sea to the Scaean Gate, there was nothing but tumbled stones. Where the Dardanian Gate had looked into the marshes, all was broken, and the swamp had moved to slime the remaining paving. Where the place of Stranger's Gods had been, sanded and swept clean before the Scamander Gate, the river had sprawled, silting and meandering.

Troy was gone.

Chryse, embracing us, asked, 'Do you want to land?'

'No,' I said. I had kept Troy in my mind, the tall towers and the strong gates. Now it only existed in my mind. This ruin had nothing of my city about it.

'On those beaches,' said Chryse, very quietly, 'I watched most of the Argive army die in agony, struck with plagues.

I, also, would not be reminded. Come, give your orders, shipmaster. Let us leave this haunted place.'

The kindly wind swept us into the Hellespont, and we lay that night in the last cove before the new city.

We all dreamed the one dream: screaming women, falling gates, the bronze horse forged as an offering to cruel Sun-Bright Apollo to fool the city into thinking the Achaeans had gone. The watch had slept and the gates had opened.

All dead: Polyxena, my sister, sacrificed to the shade of Achilles; Hector, my most beloved brother, dead, though I was pleased that he had not seen the city fall; Priam, my father, his white beard wet with red wine and blood, murdered on the floor of his own audience chamber; Pariki, my city-destroying brother, stabbed by a soldier on the beach; Eleni captured; Andromache, Hector's wife, enslaved by the same boy, Neoptelemus, son of Achilles, after he had thrown Andromache's baby, Astyanax, from the headland into the sea. The maidens of the house of maidens, scattered or as dead as Cycne, the Achaean, who would not be a slave again, a suicide in the gutter with her knife in her breast. All that was Troy, its learning and beauty and language and its people, lost in the acrid smoke of burning wood.

I shrieked myself awake and we lay clinging together on the deck. Chryse's dreams were of dying men in filthy sand in the stench of corpses. Eumides dreamt of burning, falling beams and screaming women. We drank wine and threw it up again and drank more and wept.

'We will never be healed,' I sobbed into Eumides' neck.

'Aie! Aie! Troy is lost, lost!' he wailed.

'We will never forget,' said Chryse sadly. 'But we will be healed.'

Waverider
turned the corner of the headland and we were flung into the Bay of Troas with enough force to knock us off our feet. When we had picked ourselves up and untangled our limbs, we were rowing into a quiet harbour, perhaps half the size of the Bay of Troy; a little bit taken out of the Hellespont's sheer sides.

'It's small,' commented Eumides, disappointed.

'It will thus not attract envy,' I returned. 'Listen, sailor!'

I could hear children playing, singing in high, innocent voices as they danced down the quay in a long line. One very proud small boy was leading, bearing a bunch of cock's feathers in his golden hair. He carried a kitten on his shoulder. It was evidently scratching him.

Hector, Lord of Troy,

Valiant and wise,

Hector, Golden-haired,

Protector of Troas,

Lord of the City,

Cuirass of Troy,

Hector sent us here,

Saying 'Be saved,

Children of Priam.

Share not the wreck,

Share not my death.'

Hector's pilgrims,

We came to Troas.

Built our stone houses.

Brought with us Pallathi,

Daughter of Gaia.

We sleep in peace,

In Troas our city,

Children of the Dancer,

Hector's children.

A bunch of blue-black feathers had always adorned Hector's helmet, soft and shining, with no crest to catch a spear-point. For a moment I saw him again. Hector, my dearest brother, sitting on a bench under a new vine, the cat Stathi on his shoulder, tasting the dark honeyed wine which came from Kriti. Then I blinked, and he was gone.

We came ashore and the rowers leapt onto the pebbles, dragging
Waverider
out of the surf. The dancing children abandoned their song and ran laughing to meet us.

'Welcome!' they cried in my own cradle-tongue. 'Welcome, strangers from afar! What news of the shoreless sea?'

'No news, we come from Corinth,' I said in the same speech, and the boy with the feathers stared.

'Are you of our kind, Lady, sharer of our tongue?' he asked.

'I am,' I said. 'Who rules here?'

'Scamandros and his queen, Peirithe of Phrygia,' said the child formally. 'I am Ormene, son of the palace. I will take you to them, Lady. How shall I call you?'

'They call me Cassandra,' I said. 'Here are Eumides and Diomenes called Chryse, my companions.'

The boy bowed, wincing as the kitten hung on with taloned paws. I wondered whence had come the sacred beast. From Egypt? If they had taken to selling cats, then I would be very surprised. 'If you will follow me,' Ormene said, and we walked up the steep beach and into a small town.

Those of the Troad had wrought well in so short a time. There were fine stone houses and many made of driftwood and mud-brick. Everyone was working. We passed donkeys carrying sand for cement and mud for bricks. We heard the hammering and songs of men perched on the roofs, plastering them for the coming summer to dry and harden.

Eumides ducked out of the way of a girl carrying a white-wash bucket and said, 'Do we know this Scamandros, Lady?'

'I can't recall the name - wait. Do you remember, Eumides, in the last days, when the Achaeans had gone on some errand, and the people flooded out of the city?'

'I remember,' he said soberly.

'So do I,' said Chryse, ducking under a hanging net. 'I moved the soldiers off those beaches and inland. We saw them walking across the plain, and were too sick to interfere. Fortunately.'

'Scamandros, the stone-mason, is the son of my brother Cerasimos' wife, Nelea. But I don't know his queen. He led the group which brought the image of the Pallathi out of Troy. Almost the last people to get away before the city fell.'

'The Phrygian marriage was wise,' commented Eumides. 'That alliance should preserve Troas against ordinary depredation. But this child is too old to be a son of that family. He must be six or seven.'

'I am seven years old,' said the boy proudly. 'And apart from the child, who is still with her nurse, I am the last of Priam's sons. The Lord Scamandros has appointed me his heir, above any children he may have with his queen. I don't remember much about it, just the fear as we ran across the plain, the darkness, and then we heard the screams and saw smoke rising. We do not forget the city, Lady Cassandra, or the valour of Hector of the Glittering Helmet.'

'Is that child still here?' I asked quickly.

'Indeed, Lady, and her nurse.' The child stopped abruptly, struck his forehead with the heel of his hand - a gesture so reminiscent of Hector that I caught my breath - fell to his knees and took my hand. 'Forgive me,' he pleaded.

'What transgression have you committed, son of Priam?' I asked formally.

'I did not realise, Princess. You are the fated Cassandra, cursed by the God whom we do not name, daughter of Priam, returned beyond all hope to the city of Troas, daughter of Troy. I did not recognise you, Lady.' The boy bent his head. I laid a hand on his golden curls.

'Rise, Ormene, you are forgiven,' I said ritually. 'I am no princess now, nor do I see lordship in this new, clean place. Take me to the Lord and Lady, and be blessed forever, such blessing as Cassandra has to give.'