Agamemnon’s men will be grateful to go home, back to wives and children grown older in their long absence, back to their farms, back to aged parents, back to a quiet and comfortable existence. There is no appetite for any more fighting, I am sure of it. In Mycenae, we will forget the war, consign its heartbreaks to our past. The horrors of the line of Atreus can be banished there too, I tell myself. The men who would kill their own to hold their power are all dead, and I will make this city a better place with them gone. The citizens will be as glad to forget Agamemnon as they will be to forget Troy.
Except for one person, it occurs to me, as I pull myself to my feet. I turn away from Agamemnon’s broken body, from the shattered tiles where the axe fell. There is one person here at Mycenae who cannot put Troy behind her.
27
Cassandra
A high, narrow window lets a sliver of sunlight into the cell where they brought me. A keening sound slices through the air; a girl is screaming somewhere in the palace. I don’t know if I can hear it truly or if it simply echoes inside my head; a gift of Apollo’s light. I can summon no howls of my own. Even when I think of Troy, of my sisters scattered on a multitude of Greek ships, those who survived the storm sailing to every corner of our world, I cannot quite believe it. I can’t make myself know that Troy is gone, they are gone, and there is nowhere for us to return to.
And what victory do the conquerors enjoy? The vengeance of the gods has been swift and clear. Athena revealed it at the climax of the storm, when the horizon glowed with a vast sheet of lightning, and, in the centre of it all, from the deck of the ship, we all saw one man, clinging to a jagged rock amidst the churning waters. The man who had raped me in Athena’s temple. Drenched in freezing spray, howling defiance at the gods. His crime brought this devastation upon the Greeks, and this was her punishment, saved until the last.
I remember how, for a moment, the storm was suspended: the sky shimmered with a baleful glare and the wind dropped abruptly into an eerie silence. I watched his fingers turn white as they slid away from the slick surface of the rock, his mouth stretched wide in a desperate scream. The lightning struck again, its forked tongue igniting blue fire above us, illumin-ating his frantic struggle as he surfaced, gasped for air and sank once more. Again and again, the jagged light struck, and I saw him weakening as he rose, only to be slapped back down, over and over – until, at last, he rose no more. Here in Mycenae, in my enemy’s palace, I picture that man’s bloated body sinking through the dark, picked apart by fish until his bones lie on the lightless sand.
I watched that man die before my eyes, but I can see flashes of Agamemnon’s fate, too, pulsing stark and white with every sickening throb of my head. My captor is dead, bludgeoned and battered, his dignity as shattered as the fragments of his skull. She wields the axe, triumph gleaming in her face, a savage revenge made manifest at last. Now I am the prize of a dead man, the property of a corpse. I feel a shudder of relief that I will never feel his hands upon me again.
Clytemnestra, his wife, Helen’s sister, will be coming to me next. Though she does not dazzle like Helen, I can see a similarity in their bearing. Two women who seem distant from those around them, as though they walk on separate ground to the rest of us. I had thought that Helen seemed far away, even from Paris. Still, perhaps she felt that distance, too. Perhaps she came to me when she did because we were fellow outcasts in the city.
And here in Mycenae, I have found Helen’s twin: the more formidable of the two. With Agamemnon stricken, she will come to me, a woman with no place here in the palace she rules. No place anywhere. I know that the girl screaming must be her daughter, a daughter Agamemnon had left living. What would it be like, I wonder, to have a father like that? I think of Priam, cut down by Neoptolomus. My father did not believe a word I implored him to heed, but he was a kindly man, full of pity for me, weighed down with regrets that he would never voice about the baby boy born to him whom he could not bring himself to kill. A king most unlike Agamemnon.
I would weep for him, for us all, but I am too numb, as though I am already shrouded in the fog that drifts through the realm of Hades, that rises in vapour from the great dark rivers that flow under the earth and drain away the memories of the dead into silt so they can wander the grey shores never knowing what they have left behind. I imagine the chill, damp peace of it. A place where Apollo’s searing light can never reach. A place of quiet and emptiness, where an inhabitant’s mind is no more than a flimsy veil fluttering in a breeze. A vast cavern of darkness where the sun-god will never venture.