“I could never flee my own sorrow,” he said. “So I shall make sure it does not fail.”
“I leave you to your folly!” cried the builder. “I shall attend your funeral rites. They will have to drape your mangled bodies. You will have created your own earthquake! Deliberately!” He shook his head and made his way back down the paved, slanting street.
“People are always afraid,” said Gelanor. “But desperate wants create desperate acts of courage. And, my prince, building such a palace is an act of courage.”
“You will stay to direct the building?” I asked.
Gelanor slid his eyes over to me. “How could I not?” he said. “You have won again. You set out that bait—”
“I set out no bait!” I said. “I argued with Paris that the whole idea of leaving the king’s palace is provocative. We hardly need that.”
“Oh, the lengths you go to to keep me!”
“You conceited man!” I said.
“Stop it, you two,” said Paris. “If I did not know better, I would say you sound like lovers!”
Gelanor laughed again, more heartily. Finally he said, “Well, you do know better.”
“Gelanor rarely laughs, so this proves how preposterous the idea is,” I said.
Suddenly Hector strode out of his doorway and looked at us in surprise. “Little brother!” he said. “And the most beauteous Helen.” He crossed over to us quickly, a man who did not hesitate. “What are you about, this glorious morning?”
“I am looking to become your neighbor as well as your brother,” Paris said. “I shall build my palace here. Beside yours.”
Hector raised one eyebrow. “There is already a house here, the house of Oicles the horse breeder.”
“I shall buy him off,” said Paris airily, making a gesture of dismissal.
“I am pleased to see that you are modest, my dear newfound brother,” said Hector. “For any palace here must perforce be a miniature one, as there is no space. But it can still be exquisite.”
“It will be large,” said Paris. “I have a plan to make it so.”
“Unless you have recourse to magic arts, I fail to see how that can be.”
“Wait.” Paris cast a knowing glance at Gelanor. “My magician!”
“The wisest man in Greece,” Hector recalled. “I await this with interest.”
“Where are you off to?” Paris asked. “Down to the horses?”
“Yes,” said Hector. “I need to inspect the breeding pens. A request has come in from Cyzicus for a number of mares and one fine stallion. I will make a selection this morning.”
“I showed Helen the herds out grazing yesterday. We did not visit the pens closer to the city.”
“Horses are our joy,” said Hector.
Paris did not relate being thrown, I noticed.
“Andromache loves horses,” Hector continued. “She is quite knowledgeable about them. Are you?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Ah!” Suddenly slender hands grasped Hector’s shoulders from behind, the fingers looking like tendrils. He whirled around.
“Cassandra!” I saw his arm encircle whoever it was and turn her toward us.
A flat face stared back at us, framed by lank red hair. I had never seen a paler face—even her eyebrows were invisible. Her eyes were blue, protected by deep lids that rendered them both expressionless and placid.
“I see with whom you stroll,” she said. Her voice was as flat as her face. “I had heard of their arrival. But I heard it in my head first.” She stared at him. “Your house will fall,” she said. “It will tumble.”
“Do you refer to the building of my new palace?” said Paris.
“No. It will stand as long as the others. But it will topple, consumed. Along with the others, in the flames.”
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium. I shuddered. That awful phrase again, that phrase that had come to me, unasked-for, from my own store of prophecy.
“That must be generations from now,” I said. I looked out at the magnificent buildings and the tranquil green countryside with its horses grazing. “As you know—as I certainly know, having had my own visions—time is not specified in the messages we receive.”
Cassandra looked at me as at a vile thing. “You are the cause of the flames,” she said.
“Oh, stop it,” said Paris. “Please, dear sister.”
Hector cleared his throat. “I must to the horses,” he said. “Helen, call upon Andromache when you can. She would welcome the opportunity to tell you everything about our famous horses. She loves them so.” Then he was gone in a rustle of mantle and a tramp of sandals.
We were left confronting the hostile Cassandra. She glared at us, then lifted her chin and evaluated me.
“Yes, it’s true,” she muttered. “A face to cause a war. And it will.”
“No wonder Father locked you up,” Paris said. “I shall tell him to again.”
“ ‘Because of her a great war will be fought and many Greeks will die,’ ” she recited. “And how many Trojans?”
How had she come by that phrase—the bloodcurdling one of the Sibyl? “Cassandra,” I finally said, “the shadows of the possible future must not poison our thoughts.”
“The shadows of the future have already ruined my life!” she cried.
“That is because you allowed them to drown out your present,” said Paris. “You live only in what has not yet happened, and in that sense you do not live at all, since the future always recedes before us.” He reached out to her. “Both of us, sister, have been robbed of much of our past. But if we let our prophecies rob of us our present, we are fools, and have only ourselves to blame. Come with me—come with me, into the present. Into this morning, here, sunny and warm. Live here, sister! Live with us! The truth is, you can live nowhere else.”
To my surprise, she began to cry, big tears spilling out around her guarded eyes. She made no sound at all, she just stood stricken. Finally she mumbled, “You are right. I cannot go on like this, always living in some other time, hearing other voices, never voices of my own time or place.” She touched his shoulder gently. “I do not want to go down to Hades without having walked in the sun—my own sun, not an image or a dream-sun.”
“Then stifle your prophecies, and when they come thick and fast, turn your back. Come, take my hand.”
Just as he had with me: take my hand—and made me leap, wild and bold, into a new world.
Cassandra put her pale one into his, closing her eyes and breathing deep. “I am afraid,” she said. “I have never lived—here—before.”
“It is more interesting than the world of shadows and fancies,” said Paris. “Just look at what your own eyes show you, and drink in what is before you. If you do that, you might find that Helen is a woman you would care to know, not a sign or an image.”
“But who is Helen?” she asked. “Is she more than an idea or ideal?”
Paris laughed, and put my hand in hers. “You cannot hold an idea.”
I lived; I was real; I had come to Troy to take her hand in mine.
XXXV
Yes. I came to Troy, and I began to make my home in Troy.
Evadne and I searched for a place for the sacred snake. “We must find a home for your snake,” she said. “He will feel unwelcome here if we delay much longer.” We found a small room beneath the main chambers with a trickling spring diverted into a pool. It was secluded and quiet, a perfect abode for the serpent.
It was a simple matter to have an altar built, and a place to set out the honey cakes and milk for him. When it was ready, I asked Paris to come and help release him. After all, we had first spoken privately in his presence, had declared our love in the household shrine where he lived.
Together we loosened the sack holding him, and let him slither out. He paused, regarding us—did I imagine it, or was he solemn?—and then slowly made his way across the slippery floor to a dark recess.
“Bless us,” Evadne implored. “We need yo
ur blessing. We are in a new land where only you are of our old home.”
“This is your third home,” I said. “You came with me from Epidaurus, then to Sparta, now here in Troy. But to change is to ever renew. As you shed your skin, you live forever young. Teach us to do the same. And look after Hermione, even from afar.”
Paris knelt down and spoke to him where he waited, coiled, watching him. “You gave me a sign in Sparta. You bound me to Helen, your mistress.
Now we are in my city, and we look to you. Keep us bound. Protect our home.”
The snake flicked his tongue out; then he disappeared with a start into the darkness.
Day after day the workmen came; Paris’s new palace rose on the summit of Troy. I sought out Andromache, and found her sympathetic to me, a foreigner, as she was one, too. She had been wedded to Hector from her father’s home on Plakos; more than anything she longed for a child.
As she spoke of her longing, the image of my lost Hermione loomed before me; I ached for my own child. Sometimes it was so intense I had to retreat to the secluded underground chamber with the altar, and cry out to the gods, before the sacred snake there.
Andromache confided that she had sought all the remedies, made all the proper sacrifices to the gods.
“Yet I am barren!” she murmured. “Day after day, these chambers echo with only adult voices.” She gestured toward her vast halls, her spacious chambers.
“You are young—” I would begin. Always she would cut me off.
“Young! You know better than that! I am past twenty, by my reckoning. Is that young?”
“I am past twenty-five,” I would reply.
“And? I see no children with Paris. You had your daughter at sixteen. And now—nothing!”
I would wince. Yes, that was true. And I longed for a child with Paris.
“The gods cannot deny Hector a child,” I would say. It was an unsatisfactory answer, but the only one I could give. As I had come to know him, I thought Hector one of the finest men the gods had ever fashioned. Not because he was a warrior, not because of his bearing, but because he was the sort of man who would always judge fairly, who saw and considered everything before him.
“The gods can do anything they like,” she would say. “You know that, Helen.” She would smile gently. “You are next of kin to them.”
“You mean that old swan story?” I would laugh.
“Not just from an amusing story, but your whole manner. I think there are some of us closer to the heavens than others.”
Such talk made me uncomfortable, as it always had. “Is it not time for the sweets?” I would ask her. “Your attendant is late.”
Summer came to Troy, warm sweet winds replacing the relentless sweep of the chill blasts. The grass on the plain sprang bright and green, and the Scamander shrank to a gurgling placid stream. The other river on the plain, the Simoïs, transformed itself into a series of pools as its sources dried up in the heat. It was always cool up on the heights of the city, though, and the workmen were able to continue building our palace without slowing their efforts. They said it would be ready for us by the time the days grew short again. The furnishings and decorations would come later, of course. The workmen grunted as they indicated that artists always took a long time, and were unreliable in any case. The third story had not yet risen; Gelanor was still building his clay and stick models and adding weights to it to see how it would fare. For a time he had spoken of a fourth story, but lately he had not mentioned it. Perhaps his model had collapsed when he fashioned its fourth story.
As I was mixing two types of dried meadow herbs to make a sweet-smelling potpourri for our chambers, Paris burst in and cried, “See what’s coming into Troy!” His face was flushed with excitement and he grabbed my hands so quickly I dropped the herbs onto the floor.
“Never mind the mess! Let’s go see before it gets too crowded!” Pulling me along, he rushed down the main street and toward the Dardanian Gate, where a big throng was already gathered. Someone was trying to pry the doors even farther open, so that a large object outside, groaning on a lurching platform, could be wedged in through the gate.
The crowd was already so thick we could hardly move, so Paris said, “Up into the guard tower, where we can look down on it.” We scrambled up the ladder to the platform where the archers and guards manned the tower, and from its window I could see a long golden statue. Its body was that of a lion, but it had the head of a woman.
“Straight from Egypt,” a swarthy little man with monkey arms was crying. “And what will you pay for it? I’ll not haul it a step farther unless someone is willing to buy it! I’m a fool to have brought it all this way on the promise of a man who, evidently, does not exist!”
“Was his name, by any chance, Pandarus?” someone yelled.
The statue’s owner shook his head.
“Pandarus likes such things. Or perhaps it was Antenor?”
At the sound of “Antenor” the crowd roared. I remembered the man had been elegantly dressed, so I was not surprised when someone else called out, “Oh, Antenor would never want anything so vulgar and outsized.”
“Vulgar?” its owner cried. “This is a statue from a palace of a pharaoh!”
“Stolen, I’ll warrant.” I saw Deiphobus run his hands along it, careless of dirtying it.
“If it is, the owner will not follow it here.” The man winked. “Now, which lucky Trojan will take possession of it?”
“It’s a sphinx, you know,” a dried husk of an old man said. “Sometimes they ask riddles, sometimes they tell the future. The one Oedipus encountered killed people. Perhaps you must be an Egyptian to safely own one.”
“Troy needs a sphinx!” a guardsman bellowed. “All great cities need a sphinx, and are we not the greatest city of all?”
“Yes, indeed!” the owner jumped in. “Along the Nile, there’s a city that has a whole avenue of sphinxes. You should not be outdone by—”
“I’ll warrant it has one less now!” Deiphobus said. His tone was always nasty, even when he tried to disguise it as a joke.
“We could set it up in the open space beside the lower well. And we’ll plant flowers around it, yes, and have a fountain running, and people can sit in the shade—”
“Troy deserves it!” A woman cried out.
“How could we have gone so long without one?” Another wondered.
“You see?” The owner shrugged. “Now, don’t fight over it, but who’s to be the proud owner?”
“Troy will.” Priam suddenly appeared by its side. “I, its king, will give this to the city of Troy as a gift.” He patted its back. “We must continually make Troy more beautiful.” He motioned to the workmen standing idly by the cart. “You can get it through here, even if it’s narrow. And take it to the square, as you heard.”
The owner almost rubbed his hands, but stopped himself with a twitch. “Very good, sir. But may I say, why only one? I can get you another. You know what they say—one statue is a lonely one, but two is a collection.”
Hector appeared and, putting his arm around Priam, gave the merchant a look. “Don’t press your luck, my friend.”
Laughing and skipping, the crowd fell in behind the sphinx and helped push it along. Someone brought out wine, even though it was early, and a boy started piping. We descended from the tower and followed the crowd to the paved area, watching as the sphinx was settled into its temporary place.
“I do believe my courtyard will now look bare without its own sphinx,” said Pandarus, who had arrived late on the scene.
“Confess. Confess. You were the one who ordered it, weren’t you?” Hector teased him.
Pandarus gave a look of mock horror. “Oh, no, not me! My weakness is furniture with inlays, as you well know.”
“As well my back knows,” Hector said. “Hideously uncomfortable things!”
“Inlaid furniture?” The merchant must have had superhuman hearing. “I have lovely stools and tables still on my ship. Just down there!?
?? He pointed toward the landing place. “I can fetch them in an instant!”
When Pandarus said, “Inlaid with what?” Hector groaned.
“Now you are finished!” he said.
“Ivory, or mother-of-pearl. Whichever you prefer, sir, I have them both!”
“Ummm . . .”
“Bring your wares up here!” someone in the crowd shouted. “Let’s see them all!”
“Yes, bring them all!”
“I’ll need help,” the merchant said, “to carry so much.”
Like children, the Trojans rushed out to his ship and soon returned laden with boxes and bags and carts. They spread them out on the smooth pavement of the square and let the merchant announce each thing and offer it. All the while they were gleefully commenting and bidding against one another.
Wool carpets—alabaster vials—dog collars studded with carnelian—woven sun hats—painted vases—ivory hair combs: all were snatched up by the eager crowd. Larger items like the inlaid furniture, which was truly exquisite, went more slowly. True to his word, the merchant had other statues with him, but smaller ones and no more sphinxes. These disappeared into houses and courtyards. Occasionally a spouse could be heard saying, “Dear, perhaps we should wait for the trade fair, and see what’s offered there . . .”
Paris whispered in my ear, “Shall we get something for our new palace?”
“No,” I said. “How can we furnish what exists only in a dream?” I was unsure about the safety of the new dwelling and buying something for it seemed premature.
The crowd gleefully turned from the merchant’s dwindling store of goods and began to chant, “Greek treasure! Greek treasure!”
The puzzled man said, “I do have a few jars from Mycenae, with exceptionally nice handles,” and began pawing through one of the carts.
But the people cried out, “We have our own Greek treasure, the best there is! Helen, the queen of Sparta!”
“What did we pay for her?” one man yelled.
“Nothing! She was free! A gift to Troy!”
“I’ll drink to that!” Wineskins were passed over shoulders.
I saw Priam frowning, over by the sphinx, as he heard the cries.