The scene dissolved in my head. I searched for his features: his dark beard, his thick curls – would they be streaked with grey from the years that had passed and the strain of leading the war? I was sure his eyes would flash dark and warm as ever, but perhaps wearier than before.
My mother didn’t care for how he had suffered, the toll that these relentless battles must have taken upon him. She would deny him any comfort, any spoils of war that were rightly his, even as she lolled beside the traitor, the usurper who dared to sleep in Agamemnon’s bed.
My lungs about to burst, I pushed aside the blankets, surfacing from the airless cavern I had made. My hair clung damply to my slick temples. I felt all at once a great and terrible restlessness, a frustrated energy in my limbs that made me wish again that the sea did not lie between here and Troy. If it were the harshest, driest desert that separated us instead, I would walk across it to see my father again.
I was a princess. I slept in a bed draped with the finest fabrics, in a chamber patterned with frescoes, bedecked with sumptuous hangings, with glittering gems piled up ready to adorn my hair and neck, and carved shutters at the window to keep out the burning heat of the daytime sun and to let in a cooling sweep of night air: every comfort I could imagine was at my fingertips. And yet every fibre of my being ached with longing – every part of my wretched body yearned to be amidst the smoke of campfires, beneath the rough canvas of a tent; to change places with a slave who had nothing except the thing I wanted most of all in the world. My father’s arms around her.
17
Cassandra
The war stretched on, unending, through weeks and then months and finally years. How did they have the stomach for the fight still, I wondered. How could it be possible to rise every morning to that same grim, relentless slaughter, and then drink and sleep and wake to do it all again? The Greek army was mighty, despite the bodies that kept the bloated crows squawking greedily overhead, and we watched from atop our city walls as they built their makeshift army camp into something that resembled a civilisation.
Still, our walls stood. I could not walk beyond them any longer, but daily I stared down from them across the boiling clash of armies beneath, out towards the placid sea. I would watch until black dots shimmered and swarmed my vision, until my head throbbed and I could see no more. I was searching for the other blindness, the chasm of light, the knowledge of what was to come.
But since the day that Paris had set sail for Sparta, Apollo had not spoken to me. No agony split my skull in two, no searing flash of white dazzled me, and no insight speared me. At times, a truth would come: a child would be skipping in the street, and I would see it feverish and damp, then still as marble in a flash. A day later, the mother would be tearing her hair from the roots and raking her nails down her cheeks as she wailed to Apollo in vain. A grim-faced man, barely more than a boy, whose hands shook almost imperceptibly as he strapped his breastplate to his chest, ready to stride out on to the bloodied earth – I saw him gasping for breath under a hollow sky, his flesh smeared across the sand. These little truths assailed me day by day, but what I searched for when I stared out across the carnage, what I begged for when I prayed at the feet of Apollo’s statue every dawn, did not come.
Even I began to wonder about my own foresight; perhaps, I thought, what I had seen in Paris was simply the fact of war? Troy was ruined in many ways, the city held in stasis, all of us trapped behind stone in a siege without end. Despite myself, despite the weight of despair I carried in the pit of my stomach every day, I could not stop that treacherous green shoot of hope from interweaving with my sorrow: perhaps Troy would stand after all.
Apollo’s face in the temple was smooth, blank, empty stone. The painted eyes looked sightlessly ahead. He told me nothing.
In the early days of the siege, fear and dread lay thick upon Troy. For once, it was not me alone who saw death and destruction around every corner. Every altar carried savour to the heavens, the air was filled with incense, and the lowing of cattle led to sacrifice intermingled with the thin, melodic chanting to the gods. Throughout the city, every face was taut with anguish. Day by day, men died – husbands, brothers, sons and fathers, mangled and torn, suffocating in their own blood out there. The lands that surrounded the city fell, bit by bit, to the Greeks, taking our harvests and our animals, too. The whispering threat of hunger stalked every home. It seemed the burden of it would be too much to bear; every day, the imminent horror loomed, threatening to topple and crush us all at any moment.
But every day, it did not. My brother Hector marshalled the forces of Troy. Where the men might have weakened through fear and misery, he revitalised them with his calm command and rallied them with his hope and confidence. We learned to manage with what we had, and slowly we began to forget the fresh sea breeze and lap of the waves at our feet. It was worse for the Greeks, people agreed, away from their homes and their families, living on our beaches, hurling themselves at our steadfast walls and never making any progress. They would not be able to hold on as long as we could. An end would come, if only we could be strong and wait.