‘Perhaps it was only a dream,’ one of them ventured. ‘Many women fear the birth; bad dreams are not uncommon at this time—’
‘I have borne a dozen babies,’ my mother snapped. Her dark eyes fixed on the unfortunate speaker. ‘I have no fear of the birth of another. But this . . . I cannot know if it is a baby at all.’
Horror seeped into the room. The women’s eyes flicked one to the other, searching for an answer.
‘Aesacus!’ One of the women spoke decisively, her voice reverberating sharp and sudden off the stone. ‘The seer. We will ask the seer to interpret your dream, Queen Hecabe. Perhaps in such a time as this, perhaps the true meaning of your dream is hidden even from you. We will ask Aesacus, and he will tell us what it signifies.’
Nodding; murmurs of agreement around the room. Anything, it seemed, the women wanted anything that would leach the blank shock from their queen’s eyes. Any chance that the seer could change what she had seen in her vision.
He was summoned to the throne room. The women draped a dress about my mother’s swollen body and guided her from her chambers. No one paid any mind to me, so I followed them there in time to watch as she took her throne beside my father, who had been roused from his bed, his face creased with anguished concern. He held my mother’s hand in his as Aesacus came forward.
The seer’s face was smooth and blank. His age should have carved his skin with wrinkles, but instead it stretched across his skull, thin and papery. His eyes were milky, a film obscuring what colour they had once had. I wondered how he saw through the murk, but perhaps it did not matter to him if the physical world was blurred, for he saw the world beyond it with crystal clarity.
My mother explained the dream to him again. She had mastered herself, and there was scarcely a crack in her voice to give away her strain.
The seer listened. When she fell silent, he did not speak. All eyes were fixed upon him as he crossed the great hall. From a stone shelf, he took down one of the bronze bowls of fire that lit the cavernous room and placed it on the ground. Resinous wood burned within it, casting a flickering glow across the painted scenes on the wall behind, turning the wolves that adorned the fresco into prowling monsters. Aesacus prodded the flames with his staff, pushing the wood over the leaping mouth of the fire until it hissed out, a wisp of grey smoke pluming from the dying embers. His face was shadowed. As I watched him, a breeze whispered through the stone columns and stirred the ashes in the bottom of the bowl.
The ashes settled. I thought of my mother’s dream: the baby with a burning head of fire. The seer’s expressionless face as he suffocated the flames.
‘This prince will destroy the city,’ he said. His voice was soft, like an echo spiralling from the depths of a cave, but so very cold. ‘If he is allowed to grow up, I see Troy consumed by fire, a fire he is destined to start. The child must not live.’
No one questioned him. It seemed that he confirmed what Hecabe knew already; the reason she had woken screaming from the nightmare. And after all, this baby would be one of many sons born to Priam, with plenty of daughters besides. To lose one of so many children and save his city from ruin might seem to be a price worth paying.
Neither my father nor my mother could bring themselves to pay it, though. When my brother, Paris, was born, they could not bear to fling that tiny baby from the high walls of Troy, or to smother him with a fine piece of cloth, or even to lay him down on the empty mountainside and walk away. They gave him to a shepherd instead; told him to leave the child to be taken by the cold night air or the ravening teeth and claws of whatever wild animal might be passing.
I wonder if they told the shepherd why he was to do it. If he knew the future of Troy depended on the hardening of his heart to that mewling, pitiful cry. I wonder if he tried; if he set the baby down on the scrubby hillside, if he took a step and then another before he turned around. Did he look at Paris’ tiny nose, his bald head, his soft arms reaching out for comfort, and dismiss the words of the seer as superstition and nonsense? How could a baby bring down a city he might have wondered. Perhaps his wife was barren, their home never blessed with children. Perhaps he thought that if he kept Paris outside the city walls and raised him as nothing more than a herder of goats, Troy would be safe. Its great stone towers, its mighty oak gates bolted with iron, its wealth and power must have seemed impervious to harm.
My brother lived in secret. He grew from defenceless infant to young man and none of us dreamed of his existence on the mountains outside Troy. No one spoke again of Hecabe’s nightmare, and that whole night would have taken on the quality of a dream itself, except that I remembered the scrape of stone against my back as I edged away from Aesacus. I could not forget the milky film that streaked his eyes, and the scent of smoke. The pity I felt for that soft little bundle that days later I saw carried from Hecabe’s chamber by a weeping slave, mixed with the relief that my mother had dreamed no such dreams about me.
I did try to talk to her about it once, long after it had happened. My voice was timid, and I could see that my hesitancy irritated her. I was curious about her dream, what quality it had to make her trust the seer so readily, what magic it had to make her know it was the truth. I suppose it was insensitive, looking back, but I was wrapped in the selfishness of youth, and I wanted to know.
‘You weren’t there, Cassandra,’ she snapped. The instant dismissal wounded me, and a flush bloomed in my cheeks. I only felt the recoil of my own pain, not a thought for what I was asking her to remember as I pushed on, eager to understand.
‘I was,’ I protested. ‘I remember Aesacus and the fire – I remember what he said.’
‘What? Speak up, girl,’ she commanded. She hated how quiet my voice was. As a child, I rarely made it through a sentence without being told to start it again and say it more loudly, more clearly.
No one ever asks me to repeat myself now.
I tried, haltingly, to describe the room and the rituals of the seer, but she shook her head sharply. ‘Nonsense, Cassandra, another of your imaginings,’ she said. Her tone stung. I think she noticed the hurt stamped across my face because she softened then, put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed me briefly. She spoke more gently. ‘It was not like that at all. Aesacus took my dream to the oracle, and he heard the prophecy there. Your mind has run away with you again. You must learn to hold back the wilder excesses of your imagination. Perhaps if you spent less time alone . . .’
‘Apollo only comes to you when you’re alone, doesn’t he?’
She drew back and looked hard at me.
I squirmed a little, unused to such scrutiny.
‘Is that what you want?’ she asked.
The note of doubt in her voice rattled me. Why would anyone not want it? If you could see into the future, know what was going to happen, if you could protect yourself against it – why did she make it sound as though it would be absurd to want such a gift? ‘It’s just – I’m your daughter, if the gods send visions to you, I wondered if they might – if I might . . .’ I trailed off, thrown by the worry writ across her face.
‘The gods act as they do according to reasons we cannot know,’ she said. ‘Apollo loves Troy, I am the queen – any vision that comes from the god is for the good of the city. It isn’t a gift to me; it isn’t something I sought out. It isn’t for us to ask for such a thing.’