The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

Helen looked across the bright, sunny chamber to where the wind from the plains was blowing the thin curtains in from the window. The air in Cassandra’s room was warm and humid, and carried with it the sound of pipes, drums and the cheering of crowds. Eurypylus’s army had already entered the Scaean Gate and was marching in premature triumph through the lower city on their way up to the citadel of Pergamos. Soon thousands of soldiers would be filling the palace courtyard below, where Priam would formally greet the grandson he had never met and give him Cassandra – Eurypylus’s aunt – to be his wife. And through the wine-induced fog that had obscured her thoughts and emotions almost every day since the death of Paris, Helen recalled how she had stood in her own room in Sparta, twenty years before, and listened with disdain as Agamemnon persuaded her stepfather, Tyndareus, to offer her in marriage to the best man in Greece. She shuddered at the memory and turned back to look at Cassandra.

‘Nevertheless, Hecabe has asked me to make you look your best for him, and your mother’s request is as good as an order.’

‘They say Eurypylus is an ugly man.’

‘Who says, and who would know?’ Helen laughed as she gathered Cassandra’s hair up at the top of her head and pinned it in place. ‘After all, who in Troy has seen him? Mysians and Trojans have hardly been good friends since Astyoche’s feud with Priam.’

‘I have seen him in my dreams,’ Cassandra insisted, ‘and he has a brutal face to match his brutal character. His heart is black, too, made so by an indulgent mother who has never denied him anything.’

‘Really?’ Helen responded, a hint of scepticism in her voice.

She finished tying up Cassandra’s thick locks and lifted her chin a little with her fingertip. The sombre face that had for so long been hidden behind drapes of black hair was now revealed in all its loveliness. She had a small but perfectly proportioned mouth, a slightly pointed chin with the merest hint of a dimple, pale, petite ears pressed forward by the volume of hair behind them, and large eyes heavily rimmed with long eyelashes. Cassandra looked at herself in the mirror and seemed surprised at what she saw, perhaps realising for the first time that she was a woman worthy of any man’s attention. Behind her, Helen stared at her own reflection and saw the beauty that had never withered with the loss of her youth, or been blemished by her grief for Paris. If anything, the years and her suffering had made her more beautiful, as if the divine blood that coursed in her veins had made itself more obvious with maturity. And something inside her suddenly wanted to tell Cassandra to cover up her beauty again, to hide it from a world that would kill and maim, burn and destroy for the sake of a woman’s looks.

Outside, the sound of pipes and drums was growing closer while the cheering had faded. The Mysians had left the crowds of the lower city behind and entered Pergamos itself.

‘Everyone knows there’s nothing Astyoche won’t do for her son,’ Cassandra continued. ‘And in return he hangs upon her every word, doting over her like a pet puppy.’

There was a hint of disgust in her tone, and Helen laid a comforting hand on her shoulder.

‘If she has spoiled him, it’s exactly because she wants him as her pet – a creature that will do her bidding without question. But I don’t believe she has given him everything. Not her heart. Else, why would she send him out to risk his life in battle, for the sake of a father she despises? In her pride she wanted Priam to come begging for her help – as she knew he would, one day – and that victory, symbolised by the Golden Vine, is worth more to her than Eurypylus.’

Another gust of wind blew the curtains inward again, brushing them against a small clay jar filled with perfume that Helen had brought with her for Cassandra. It fell from the table and smashed, making the two women start. As their maids had already been dismissed, Helen slipped her hand from Cassandra’s shoulder and walked over to the broken pieces, picking them up one by one and placing them in her palm. Kneeling there, she heard the pulsing of the drums and the heavy tramp of marching feet coming up the last ramp to the courtyard below, followed by a loud command and then silence. She looked at Cassandra, then stood and moved to the window. Dropping the shards of clay on the table, she brushed the fluttering curtain aside with her arm and looked out.