The Firebrand

  Now—counting time from the moon—she had begun to wonder, with dismay and revulsion, if she might be pregnant. When she had first taken Aeneas to her bed, she had not thought much about it. The priestesses were taught ways to avoid such things if they chose; but these arts often failed, and aboard the ship she had been too ill to heed them. She had been resigned to the fact that sooner or later she would find herself with child by Aeneas. But the possibility that this might be Aeneas’ child was very small indeed; since the blow on the head she had a certain amount of trouble remembering exactly when he had last been with her, or when she had last seen evidence that she was not pregnant. So it was probable that this was the child of Agamemnon—or worse, of Ajax, who had taken her first. Kassandra rarely listened to girls’ gossip, but she had heard them saying often enough that one was not likely to get pregnant the first time with any man. But she had seen evidence, whatever they believed or hoped, that once was quite enough. If she had to choose, she would hope it was Agamemnon’s child: him she detested, but it was not he who had taken her by force over the body of her dead child. The fact that she was recognized as his chattel and prize of war was not pleasing to her. All my life I feared him, she thought, remembering her first vision when she was a child, but at least he had behaved no worse than custom allowed in such cases.

  It was an evil custom certainly, but he had not invented it, and it would hardly be reasonable to blame him for following his tradition. If she had been given by her parents in marriage to this man, he would have used her no worse, and probably no better.

  He was, she supposed, no more reprehensible than any other Akhaian; as they were reckoned, she supposed he was considered a good man. She even realized that he had actually been frightened by her continuing sickness; at first he had tried to gentle her out of it, reassuring her that it was always this way at the beginning of a voyage and that she’d soon grow used to it, encouraging her to get into the fresh air; when it did not subside, he left her alone a good deal, for which she was dimly grateful.

  She thought sometimes that he might be trying to show her kindness. Once when she had vomited all over him (without apology; she had not asked him, nor given him leave, to bring her on this voyage at all) he had not beaten her—as she half expected (she had seen him beat one of his servants for spilling his clean shaving water)—but had called for fresh water to rinse her mouth, and had held her in his arms, covering her with a fresh cloak and trying to soothe her to sleep again.

  That had been early in the voyage, while she was still in a mad confusion and rage of hatred; she would not look at him or speak, and he had soon stopped trying to engage her in conversation about the lands they passed. Now she wished she had encouraged him in this talk—it might be useful if she should ever escape. She could not return to Troy—there was nothing to return to—but she might go to Colchis, where Queen Imandra, or any priestess in the house of Serpent Mother, would welcome her, or to Crete; and in the islands there were many Temples where a priestess skilled in the healing arts or the lore of serpents might find shelter.

  She was not closely guarded, perhaps because at first it had been so obvious that between the head wound and seasickness she was incapable of walking, let alone attempting any kind of rebellion or escape.

  Now, lying on the sun-flooded deck outside the tent she shared with Agamemnon, listening to the slow drumbeat which kept time for the rowers, she thought, It is more than that. It would never occur to them that a woman might think of escape. A week ago when they had gone ashore on a little island to find fresh drinking water, they had left her unguarded. She had not tried to escape then—she could see that the island was so small that she could not possibly have hidden anywhere or found shelter. If anyone had lived there, to ask for shelter would have been to bring down the wrath of Agamemnon on the hapless peasant who might take pity on her. Only if there had been a shrine of the Maiden—or of the Sun Lord—would she have dared claim sanctuary.

  She might do that still, if she could find such a shrine, although she supposed Agamemnon might legitimately claim her as a fair prize of war. Scant sympathy was shown to runaway slaves, and she could no longer claim to be a princess, since Troy had fallen. Everyone who spoke of her (she had overheard Agamemnon’s soldiers and servants) seemed to think there was no reason she should not be content with him for the rest of her life.

  She realized that she was allowing her mind to wander to keep from thinking seriously about the fact that she was probably carrying Agamemnon’s child. Should she tell him? Not at once; it would please him too much, and he might think she was making some kind of claim to his sympathy or kindness.

  Agamemnon was at the stern of the ship, standing beside the man who held the steering-oar. He was dressed, as were all his men, in a simple loincloth of bleached coarse linen; but the gold torque round his neck and the ornaments he wore, no less than his military bearing and air of command, made it obvious who was King and who were the servants.

  He saw her seated in the shadow of the sail and strode across the deck.

  “Well, Kassandra, I am glad to see you awake,” he said. “The sea is calm, and the sun will do you good. When we went ashore for drinking water this morning”—she had been asleep and only dimly aware of the cessation of motion—“my men gathered some fresh grapes; perhaps you would like some of them?” Without waiting for her answer, he shouted to the four serving-women who spent most of their time huddled together at the stern gossiping. “You, there”—Kassandra had no idea of the women’s names because Agamemnon never spoke to them by any name except “girl” or “you”—“bring us some of those grapes. You greedy little beasts haven’t eaten them all, have you?”

  “Oh, no, my lord,” murmured the tallest of them, and rose. From an enormous basket she seized four or five bunches of small wild grapes, laid them on a silver tray (Kassandra had seen it in the palace; Hecuba had used it for grapes too because it was etched with vines) and brought them across the deck.

  The girl knelt before Agamemnon; he gestured for her to offer them to Kassandra first. She looked familiar; had she seen her in the streets of Troy somewhere in that other life?

  “Princess . . .” she whispered, her eyes humbly cast down. It made Kassandra wonder what had happened to Chryseis when the city fell. She reached out and broke off a few grapes from a bunch, and bit into one. The juicy tartness was pleasant, and she swallowed, hesitantly, half expecting the queasiness to break over her again. Agamemnon had taken a bunch and was eating them with relish. His teeth were large and white and strong—just like a horse’s, Kassandra thought with fascinated revulsion. She had to turn away to avoid a convulsive spasm, but she managed to swallow a few grapes, and did not feel immediately compelled to vomit.

  “I am glad to see you eating again,” Agamemnon observed. “Seasickness seldom lasts this long, and when you are in health you will be as beautiful as when I first saw and desired you.”

  She realized that he thought it would please her; he was trying to be friendly. Well, she seemed to be bound to him for a time at least; certainly if she was pregnant she must put aside all thought of escape until after the child was born. And it would be foolish to force him to consider her an enemy and perhaps keep closer watch on her, as he would certainly do if he thought she was considering escape.

  But does he really believe that I will love him and obey him as a husband when he has murdered my brethren and my parents and my city?

  It appeared to be exactly what he thought.

  “Will you have more grapes?” he asked, and selected a bunch from the tray. She nodded and ate a few more. After a moment she started to speak; but she had not spoken a word since she came aboard, and now her voice failed her. She had to clear her throat twice before speaking.

  “How much longer will we be aboard this ship?”

  He looked startled, as if he had grown so used to her refusal to speak that he half believed she could not. But he said amiably enough, “I can well believe you
are weary of travel. It is never possible to tell how long the journey will take; if we have fair winds and fair weather, we might arrive before the moon has fulled twice more. If we have bad weather and the winds are against us, we might not arrive before the worst of the winter.”

  She wished she had not asked; the thought of two more months on shipboard appalled her. And what would happen to her when they came to Mykenae?

  That thought must have passed visibly across her face, because he said reassuringly, “You must not be frightened. My wife, Klytemnestra, is a gracious lady, and she would never treat badly one who had been a princess in Troy. She does not think she must prove her own royalty by treating others as her inferiors. Everyone in our house, servant or slave, is treated as custom demands, neither better nor worse.”

  It would not have occurred to Kassandra to be afraid of Klytemnestra. She was the twin of Helen, and Kassandra had loved Helen and found her a friend. Now it occurred to her that Agamemnon himself was afraid of his wife and that was why he thought she might be.

  Was he afraid because she was the Queen of the land and he had become King only as her consort? She still might cherish her anger with him over the evil trick he had played in sacrificing her daughter Iphigenia to the God of the winds; after all, Iphigenia had been her eldest daughter, and Klytemnestra would have thought of her as her heir.

  Kassandra remembered old crude jokes about shrewish countrywomen greeting faulty or drunken husbands with blows over the head from a winnowing fan or a dough roller; did Agamemnon fear some such greeting?

  She looked at him and saw that the fear was deeper and blacker than that. For an instant it seemed as if there were blood smeared on his face that would never wash away; she told herself it was only the light of the setting sun. And if she truly saw blood, what wonder? He was a bloody man, a warrior who had slain hundreds in his long career.

  She put the grapes aside, and shifted her weight; the roiling nausea, which had subsided for a little while, came back. She sighed and dragged herself back into the deck tent, glad to be again at rest. No, there was no way now to hide from the knowledge. She was with child, whether by Agamemnon or by another, and sooner or later he would have to know it.

  That night the weather broke; the north wind rose and battered the ship so hard that even after the sail was lowered, high waves swamped the tent on deck and Agamemnon gave orders for everything to be lashed down. Kassandra was too sick with the rolling and pitching of the ship even to be terrified; she lay clutching a safety rope which Agamemnon had made fast about her, vomiting and at intervals wishing that the ship would be cast on the rocks or the tent washed overboard so that she could drown and be at peace.

  The storm continued many days, and even when it subsided she wanted nothing more than to lie on deck and pretend she was dead. Her one hope was that the violence about her would bring on a miscarriage. This did not come to pass. Rage alternated with despair; what would she do with a child in captivity—bring it up as another of Agamemnon’s slaves?

  The day finally came when, as she had known he eventually must, Agamemnon looked at her and said, “You’re carrying.”

  She nodded sullenly, not looking at him, but he smiled, and stroked her hair. He said, “My beautiful, have you forgotten my promise, that you are not my slave but my lawful consort?’ He had indeed said something like that, but she had paid no more attention than she did to anything else he had said while she was still vomiting every hour or so. “You must not be afraid for our child; I pledge you my word that it will not be a slave but will be acknowledged and brought up as my son. I do not trust the children of Klytemnestra. Our son will be shown how much I value his mother, who was a princess of Troy.”

  She was dimly conscious that he was trying to please her; that he considered himself very generous and indulgent. Did he actually believe she could be led to thank him for treating her as a human being?

  She supposed some women might be grateful not to have been treated worse, since such was his unlimited power. She raised her eyes and said, unsmiling, “That is kind of you, my lord.” For the first time afraid of what he might do, she spoke the words she had promised herself never to say.

  They pleased him, as she had known they would; men were so easily deluded and flattered. He smiled and kissed her. Going to one of the many great chests in which he kept the spoils of Troy, he took from it a gold necklace with four strands, each formed of many small links and engraved plates.

  He stooped and put it about her neck.

  “This befits your beauty,” he said. “And if your child is a son, you shall have another to match it.”

  She had wanted to fling it back in his face. What arrogance, to give her as a gift some small part of what he had stolen from her family! Then she thought: If I escape him, this necklace, with the links pried off and sold one at a time, would carry me to Colchis or even to Crete. Creusa is there, and perhaps Aeneas: she has only daughters and might be glad of a son, even if Agamemnon had fathered it.

  How will he feel if instead of the son he wants he has only a daughter? That would almost please her, she thought, to give him what he does not want; but then she asked herself, Who would choose to have any child born as a girl into this world, to suffer at the hands of men what all women suffer?

  And then at the thought of a little girl like Honey, even one fathered by Agamemnon, her heart softened. If this child was a girl she would take her to Colchis, so that she might be reared where she need never be a slave.

  Days passed, and as she had seen in other women who were in the hands of the Life Forces, she grew sluggish and heavy on her feet, unwilling to rise, though Agamemnon, now that he knew of her pregnancy, was gentler with her. Every day when weather permitted he escorted her about the deck, insisting that she must have some air and exercise. Once he expressed a hope that they would reach Mykenae before she was delivered.

  “We have excellent midwives there, and you would be safe in their hands,” he told her. “I do not know if any of these women on the ship know anything about such things.”

  One of them had been her mother’s waiting-woman and the chief of the palace’s midwives; but she did not tell Agamemnon that. She did, however, contrive secretly to speak to the woman and tell her what had happened.

  “Oh, well, Princess,” the woman said, “if you give him a son he’ll cherish you all the more; you’ll be safe in Mykenae as mother of the King’s son.”

  Secretly Kassandra had been hoping the woman would share her outrage, and she had intended to ask if the old woman could produce for her an herb potion which would cause her to miscarry. It confirmed her belief that women everywhere conspired with their oppressors.

  Once when Agamemnon was sitting beside her, speaking of their son, she asked, “But do you not have a son by Klytemnestra? And being the eldest, would he not take precedence?”

  “Oh, yes,” Agamemnon said with an evil smile, “but my Queen values only her daughters; she pretended to believe that one of them would follow her as Queen. She even sent our son to be fostered away from the palace, so that I could not school him in the ways of king-craft.”

  That, Kassandra thought, was the best thing she had ever heard of Klytemnestra. She had wondered how Helen’s sister could ever have brought herself, even for reasons of political expediency, to marry a man like Agamemnon. But perhaps her people had given her no choice, or had wanted a King, who commanded iron, to rule over their war parties.

  “Our son, Kassandra, might rule after me over the city of Mykenae,” he said to her. “Does that not please you?”

  Please me?

  But she only smiled at him; she had learned that if she smiled, he took it for agreement and was better satisfied than if she spoke.

  There was at this season no good weather on the sea, but endless rain and wind, and every time they sailed a little way toward where they wanted to go, the winds would rise and beat them back so that they were always in danger of being driven onto the rocks. r />
  Frequently Agamemnon had to head out into open water to avoid being driven onto a shore that would destroy the ship; it seemed that with days and months of sailing, they were no nearer to where they wished to go. One day, after a fearful hard-driving wind had blown them about for many days out of sight of land, a morning calm left them drifting. A sailor came to Agamemnon saying that they had sighted a stream of green water like a separate current in the sea. Agamemnon went on deck cursing, and she heard him shouting at his men; when he came back he was furious, his face drawn and dark with rage.

  “What is the matter?” she asked him. She was lying on the deck, trying desperately to keep down the little bread and fruit she had eaten for breakfast.

  He scowled and said, “We have sighted the outpourings of the Nile—the great river of the country of the Pharaohs. Poseidon, who rules the sea as well as the earthquake, has driven us far from home, and onto the shores of Egypt.”

  “That does not seem a catastrophe,” she said. “You were saying that we were gravely in need of fresh food and fresh drinking water. Can they not be had here?”

  “Oh, yes; but the word of Troy’s fall has been spread all about the world now, and much gold will be expected for supplies,” he muttered. “And everyone has told a different tale about what happened . . .”

  “People do not know that Troy fell not to might of arms and soldier-craft, but to the earthquake,” Kassandra said. “You can tell them what tale you will and they will not be rude enough to doubt it.”