A Thousand Ships(67)
The poet may not want to learn this, but he must.
36
Cassandra
Cassandra had to admit it: Apollo’s punishment of her was an example of almost perfect cruelty. She had longed to have the gift of prophecy. Longed for it. She spent so many hours in the temple with her brother, Helenus. Each of them a sea of dark locks and a pair of dark eyes, but only one of them beautiful enough to catch the interest of the god himself. She loved Helenus but, like many twins, she felt she needed something which he didn’t have, so she could be sure of where he ended and she began. He had always told her that her beauty was distinction enough. But she wanted something more, something that would not fade over time.
When Apollo revealed himself to her, it was in the cool hour of the night. She and Helenus sometimes slept in the temple, if their devotions had kept them there late: he on the left side of the door, she on the right. They wedged soft cushions beneath their heads and she would wriggle under an unfinished robe and use it as a blanket. It was not impious to take the god’s clothing if the embroidery had not been finished yet and it had not been dedicated to him. So when the god appeared, he was kneeling behind her head, his tongue licking her earlobe to wake her. She woke with a start, thinking it was a viper whispering in her ear. She sat up and turned, expecting to see it slithering away across the cool white stone. But instead she was faced with the radiant glow of a god, slightly larger than a mortal man, and possessed of a strange inner light. He demanded her and she refused. He asked a second time, and now she was fully awake she refused again, unless he gave her something in return.
‘What do you want?’
‘To see the future,’ she said.
‘Some people think of that as a curse,’ he replied. His golden hair, which flowed back from his forehead in luscious waves, was oppressively bright. He was beautiful but somehow cold, for all the warm light that he exuded. She found herself squinting to keep her eyes from watering. ‘But if that is what you want, you shall have it.’
She expected him to do something, to touch his gold hand to her brow. But he lay motionless beside her as the visions filled her mind. Everything that had been was somehow less real to her than everything which was to come.
‘Now give me what is due,’ he said, reaching his hand out to touch her skin, which looked almost blue in comparison with his radiance. The vision of what was about to happen was potent. She feared what the god was about to become, so much so that she pulled her hands across her body and her knees up to her chest.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
Apollo’s beauty was transformed in the time it took to blink. The ever-young, ever-glowing Archer was suddenly a vicious, vengeful man, his open hand contracting into a fist.
‘You dare to refuse me?’ he asked. ‘You dare to refuse your god after making a bargain with him?’
She screwed her eyes shut and tried to block out his rising voice by balling her hands into her ears. Where was Helenus? Why was he not awake? Apollo lunged at her, like a snake moving towards its prey. She felt the sudden curdling of his saliva in her mouth, and then he was gone.
No one had ever spat on her before, and she scraped her fingers along her tongue in disgust. But the damage was done. Her gift for prophecy was flawless and perpetual. Her gift for persuasion – for the words formed by her defiled tongue to be believed – was gone. And she knew it, long before she spoke another word. She could already see herself being disbelieved by everyone she loved, even Helenus. She could see her warnings falling on ears which refused to hear. She could see the frustration bubbling from her lips as no one listened to her. And she realized that in one gesture, Apollo had cursed her to a lifetime of solitude and what would appear to be madness. Her one consolation – and it was like a tiny pinprick in the blackness – was that she would not be mad. But she would always know what was coming. And all of it terrified her.
Over time, Cassandra had learned to cope with the horror of what had befallen her. At first, the sheer weight of tragedy – of every sickness, every death, of every person she knew and every person she met – overwhelmed her. She found herself screaming warnings at anyone she saw, trying to ward off disaster. The harder she tried, the deafer they became. Time and again she watched the shock on people’s faces, when precisely what she had predicted – and they had ignored – came true. Sometimes she imagined she saw a flicker of recognition in their eyes, as if part of their minds knew that she had given them a warning. But the flicker soon died, and in its wake it left only an intensified hatred of the babbling priestess, which all attributed to her gibbering lunacy. She became unable to cope with meeting anyone outside her close family and servants, because it required her to see a whole new set of tragedies, in addition to the stillborn children, sickening spouses and crippled parents which already filled her mind. So when they locked her in a thick-walled room in the citadel, with only one slave (whose child would die from an untreated injury, and who would eventually string herself up by the cord which bound her tunic at the waist), it came as a relief.
The room was dark, with small high windows, and it reminded her of the temple. Helenus came to visit her sometimes, and her grief at what he would do was tempered by the knowledge that he would survive the war, albeit held in captivity by the Greeks. But she also knew that her mother would die believing all her sons had been killed because she could not believe Cassandra. And how was it possible that her beloved twin would betray Troy to the hated Odysseus? That he would take the gift of prophecy which he had acquired – to a lesser extent than his sister, but with the advantage of being heard – and use it to betray their city? And all because he was not given the hand of Helen after Paris had died, though he must surely have known that Helen of Troy would become Helen of Sparta once more. Cassandra could almost smell the rocky terrain of the Peloponnese on her: Helen would never remain in Troy once the war was over.