Goddess of Yesterday (25 page)

We sat for a long time. “Who will the husband be?” I whispered.

“Agamemnon. He will take me as loot, not as wife.”

I held her hand, which was very cold. “I met Agamemnon,” I told her. “He is frightening, but I thought he was just and kingly. Perhaps it won't be so bad.”

And then the earthquake came.

I have felt them several times in my life but one does not grow accustomed to the wrath of that god. When he stands beneath you and shoves up with his hands, throwing aside your tall columns and wide roofs as if they are nothing more than broken pottery—no, you do not get used to that.

A tiny table in Cassandra's cell danced across the floor. The poles of her hanging loom split. The roof fell in, opening her prison to the sky. The hand of the god even wrenched the bottom of her tower, trying to tear it off and fling it to the earth. I screamed but Cassandra was unmoved.

The quake ceased.

The city struggled for breath.

“No one has died,” said Cassandra. “But they will count heads and you do not want to be missing. You must not make Helen think of you.”

I got out of Cassandra's bed. I did not see how she could survive in this frigid place. “Why does Helen hate me?”

“How do you suppose it feels to be the most beautiful woman on earth, and your husband doesn't see or care? How do you suppose it feels when a little girl, filthy with sand and dried gore, gets more attention than you, his holy wife?”

Helen? Jealous of me? “You are wrong, Cassandra.”

The god kicked the world once more and the floor quivered. From nowhere came great clouds of dust. Some stones toppled. A baby wailed.

“Oh, Cassandra, I must find Pleis! I have to be sure he is all right! Where will I find him? Is that the kind of thing you know?”

“He is with the children of the princes. He is laughing. He thought the earthquake was a grand game. He loved how everything fell off the walls and splashed on the floor. Do not go near him. All that keeps you safe is that Helen and Paris have for a moment forgotten you.”

“He is my prince, Cassandra. How can I be neutral when my prince is unsafe?”

“You are not neutral,” said Cassandra. “It is not your nature.”

I almost asked about somebody else who wanted to be neutral. I almost asked whether the king of Lemnos would come back in the spring, and whether he would love me. But if Cassandra were to say that I should never see him again, I could not get through the winter.

Zeus sent a howling gale of snow and gloom. At night when the sun went down, the ice turned purple, like frozen wine. Our toes and fingers felt the same.

We did not see much of the men. They were shoveling away snow and rebuilding the roofs of Troy.

We girls spun donkey loads of wool. Hour after hour, day after day, we twirled the clay cups. To keep our minds off blue toes and chapped fingers, we went in circles telling stories. One day I described the keeping-track lines.

The princesses laughed so hard they dropped their spindles. Twisted threads of unplied yarn tangled over each other. “That's why you have clerks, Callisto,” said one of Priam's daughters. “It is not the work of a king to call out how many barrels of salted fish have been sold. Slaves exist to remember such things.”

The princesses were always happy to make ugly remarks about Menelaus and how poor a king he was. I listened for some time. “Keeping-track lines are very useful,” I said stiffly.

“How?” they wanted to know. “You make a keepingtrack line for a bushel of grain, but then you eat it. It's gone. What was the point of keeping track?”

“It prevents quarrels. You can store a fact in the clay. If two men fight about who owes money to whom, the clay proves who is right and who is wrong.”

“Deciding who is right and who is wrong is the task of a king,” said a princess I had liked until then. “Has Menelaus not even figured out what a king does? No wonder Helen left him for a better man.”

“If there is a war, Callisto,” said another princess, “you have proved that it will be over in a day. The warriors of
Troy against a man who worries about counting his pottery? It will be a joke.”

“If you can call Menelaus a man. Couldn't keep Helen, could he?”

Andromache tried to change the subject. “I think Paris and Helen will have a son,” she said. “Helen is carrying the baby very high; that always means a boy.”

Nobody wanted it to be a girl. Girls are all right, in their place, but glory comes with sons, and Paris expected glory, Helen expected glory, King Priam and Queen Hecuba and every prince in Troy expected it.

But Helen already had a boy.

I checked on Pleis as often as I could. By night he slept in the tiny house of Paris and Helen. By day Kora, the pockmarked bear woman, carried him to the palace to abandon him among the royal children. I had bribed each of their nurses with the rest of my wasp-in-amber beads. They took the beads, but I did not know how much time they spent on the son of the enemy.

Rumor had reached us that Agamemnon and Menelaus were putting together a fleet. Battle fever rose and people were eager for the clash. The presence of Menelaus' little boy pleased no one.

“Helen is preparing the baby clothes,” said Andromache. “She certainly can weave like a queen. Have you seen the pattern she is doing for the baby blankets?”

No, but I had seen the clothes Pleis wore. The same he had worn on the
Ophion.

“Have you been in their sweet little house yet? Queen Hecuba let Helen pick anything she wanted from the treasury to furnish it. She said Helen must have the best of everything.”

“Then why is that horrible old giantess Kora on Helen's staff ?”

There was a chorus of groans. “Nobody wants Kora around.”

“Nobody wants the little boy around either. A son of the enemy? They should have put him to death to start with.”

Day after day, snow blurred the horizon and the passage of time. Yet the days leaped forward and winter was flung aside.

The salt marsh filled with flowers. The willows by the Scamander River were laced with yellow buds. The wind was soft and the sky was warm and we had the first real news of ships from a port across the sea.

They said there were a thousand ships.

A thousand sheep, yes. But a thousand boats? It was a foolish rumor.

Then we heard that not one of those thousand ships could sail against Troy. There was not a whisper of wind on the sea. Menelaus could not go to war.

How Troy laughed.

But there are ways to bring a god to your side. They are done through the king, and the king of kings was not Menelaus, but Agamemnon his brother.

I am sure Agamemnon expected to sacrifice a hundred black bulls. But no. The word of the gods was that he must make his own child holy. It is not hard to make things holy with a lamb. But to make war holy with your own daughter?

The army chose Iphigenia, the cousin who had spent a summer at Amyklai and been such fun for Hermione.

I remembered a shrine on Siphnos, clamped to the side of a cliff. Iphigenia must have died at such a place. I am sure she
went bravely to the altar. I am sure she tried to make it easier for her father. I am sure she neither begged nor cried out.

But even on the orders of Zeus, how terrible to slit your own daughter's throat.

Had Agamemnon wanted to disobey the god?

Had he screamed at his assembled army—Let Paris keep Helen! Forget the treasure! Forget the insults!
Just let me have my daughter, my dear Iphigenia.

But weakness does not make a king.

“A Jew lived here once,” said Andromache.

“What is a Jew?”

“It's a people near Sidon, where Paris had such a brilliant victory and returned with such treasure.”

Where civilized life vanished at a banquet table, I thought, and we were all pirates, and all the world our prey.

“The Jew had a king named Abraham.
His
god also required that he make things holy with the death of his son Isaac. But at the very last moment, his god rushed out of the sky and said Abraham didn't have to kill him after all.”

“There must have been feasting in that household,” I said.

Talk of war draws young men.

How they loved to prepare. To sharpen the knives and javelins. Practice with the sword. Feint left and shift right. Squint into the sun and make plans for glory.

Chariots were harnessed, drivers dashing toward the sea as if to meet an army, but in fact, just racing their friends and then gathering under the great oak at the Scaean Gate to talk of war.

But the young man I wanted to see was not drawn to war.

“I have not heard from Euneus,” said Hector, all black beard and dark frown. “He will be one with Menelaus.”

“He will be neutral,” I said, although war talk did not concern me and I should not have spoken.

Hector looked at me. “When a friend needs you,” he said, “there can be no such thing as neutral. He has not come to help us, therefore he is against us.”

Friends of Paris gave parties.

Friends of Hector offered strategies, for he would be general over all.

Men from a dozen kingdoms came to prove their valor. When the war ended, they would gain wealth and splendor from the ruin of Menelaus and Agamemnon. Pelasgian sailors arrived. Thracians with their hair all in a tuft. Carians decked in gold. Horsemen from Phrygia and men with boars' tusk masks from Mysia and men with tattooed hands from Paphlagonia.

The tents of the allies stretched for miles on the grass. Now across the plain were a thousand campfires. A new sound filled the air: the din of ten thousand men talking.

And then came the ships of the allies of Menelaus, the greatest gathering Earth has ever seen.

All at once they came, swiftly, fiercely. There were so many that they closed the mouth of the bay, like the jaws of war.

Iphigenia had died well.

Helen knew the ships by their flags and stood on the ramparts with King Priam and Paris, calling out the kingdoms, while Hector, appalled, counted out the ships.

“That flag!” cried Helen. “That's Boeotia!”

“Fifty ships,” whispered Hector.

“The Locrians!” she said gleefully.

Forty black ships.

Argos and Tiryns. Eighty black ships.

Twelve from Salamis, fifty from Athens, eighty from Crete.

When Paris and his thirty-three ships had pulled up on foreign land, Paris had faced his ships outward so he could flee. But these ships faced the shore. They were not leaving in haste.

“All these captains,” asked Priam, “took oaths in the Blood of the Horse to defend you?”

“Yes,” said Helen, glowing with joy.

No, I thought. Menelaus corrected you. They took oaths in the Blood of the Horse to defend
him.

“Those are interesting ships,” said Priam, pointing. He might have been admiring acrobats at a feast. “They are painted not just with eyes, but with red cheeks.”

“The ships of Odysseus of Ithaca,” said Helen. “A crafty man and dangerous.”

And then came the ships of Menelaus himself. Sixty strong.

And the ships of Agamemnon. One hundred.

Every ship was its own procession to war.

As each vessel drew close, its sail was furled and stowed. Its anchor stone was tossed into the sea and its cables made fast. Its crew climbed out into the breaking surf, leading the sacrifice.

I was so proud of Menelaus. He would not pull up on strange soil without making it holy. I wondered where he had obtained so many white heifers, so many black bulls.

“He bought that stock from Euneus,” said Hector.

“Euneus will be neutral,” said King Priam cheerfully. “It's all right. If the war lasts more than a day or two, we might need to exchange prisoners or some such thing. Euneus will handle that.”

Cassandra had said the war would last ten years. Nobody believed her. Only Hector seemed to believe it would be more than one battle.

“Already,” said Hector gloomily, “based on counting the oars, there are five of them for every one of us.”

“We can stay inside our walls,” said Priam reassuringly. “We have more supplies than they could possibly bring by ship. They can't get at us and we don't need to fight.”

“Of course we need to fight,” said Hector. “They will slaughter our people, Father. In the city below. In fields and hills, in marsh and forest.” Hector paced back and forth. He was huge. There was no room for anyone else on the battlements when he marched around. “Do you think they are civilized, these Greeks?” he demanded. “They are animals. Wild dogs in a fever. They will kill the innocent to force us into battle.”

Menelaus would never kill the innocent! I wanted to shout. You Trojans are the ones who murder a host. We wouldn't do that.

Cassandra was suddenly next to me. “You are thinking of Paris,” she said very softly. “Paris murders. Hector, never. He is just and fair, honoring at all times the best in his fellow man.”

From what I had seen, war produced the worst in my fellow man, not the best.

“Cassandra,” said her father the king, embracing her. Priam did not ask why she was not in her tower. He did not send her back.

Helen was furious.