The Firebrand (77 page)

Paris shrugged; the movement made him flinch again.

“An arrow wound. It didn’t touch a bone,” he said.

“Kassandra,” Helen said, “come and look at this; what do you think?”

Kassandra came and folded back the sleeve of Paris’ tunic. It was a flesh wound, a small depression just above the elbow. Purple and puffy, like pouting lips, it had already closed, and from it a drop or two of blood oozed.

“It is not, I think, too serious,” she said, “but it should be washed in wine and bathed with very hot water and herbs; if a puncture wound closes too quickly, it can be serious. At all costs it must be kept open and made to bleed freely to cleanse it.”

“She is right,” said Khryse, bringing a flask of wine, which he began to pour over the wound; but Paris grabbed the flask.

“A waste of good wine,” he said, and poured it into his mouth instead, making a wry face. “Ugh, not even fit for that. Might be good to wash my feet with.”

Khryse shrugged. “There is better wine for the drinking in the Sun Lord’s house, Prince Paris; this is a poor vintage kept for cleansing wounds. Come and have some of the better vintage while we tend you.”

“Better yet, come to our rooms in the palace and let me tend you,” Helen said. “You have had enough fighting for one day—and there is nobody left to fight.”

“No,” Paris said, walking to the wall. “I hear Agamemnon; he’s got some of those archers of his to attack again. Let’s go down and drive them off. Already they say I spend too much time in your boudoir being cosseted, my Helen; I am weary of a coward’s reputation. Here, tie this up with your scarf and let me go.” He pulled his armor together over the bound wound and was off down the stairs. They heard him shouting to his men.

“Oh, why did he have to have a damned attack of heroism right now?” Helen said angrily. “And if it was really an altar to Poseidon, do you think the God will be angry because he burned it down?”

“I don’t see what else he could have done, whether the God is angry or not,” Kassandra said. “Perhaps the Earth Shaker will remember all those nice fat horses that we gave Him courtesy of Odysseus a couple of hours ago.”

“I pray it does not hamper his riding and shooting,” Helen said. “When he comes back—if he survives this charge—I will take him off to be tended by the best of the healers.”

“I will go and send our best healer-priests to the palace for him, Lady Helen,” Khryse said, and went off up the hill. Kassandra watched the charge; Paris fought like a madman, as if the War-God’s self inhabited him, and she lost count of how many of the Akhaian soldiers he cut down and left bleeding on the ground.

“I have never seen him fight like this before,” Helen said.

Pray you never do again,
Kassandra thought.

“Maybe the wound is as slight as he says; he seems not to be favoring the arm at all.”

“He rides like Hector himself,” said Priam, watching him from the wall. “We have all been unjust to the boy, thinking him less heroic than his brother.”

Helen shut her eyes as a sword came down toward Paris; he parried the blow at the very moment when it seemed it must strike his head from his shoulders. It was the last blow; a moment later Agamemnon’s men broke and ran. Paris yelled as if he were going to chase them into the water, but before long he called off his men.

“If there is a bullock, have it killed for the men’s dinner,” he said to Hecuba, as he came up the stairs to the waiting women. “I have never seen such fighting.”

Helen hurried to embrace him. “Praise to Aphrodite that you are safe still!”

“Yes, She is still watching over us; She did not bring you here to Troy only to abandon us now.” Paris looked down at the ashes of the structure the Akhaians had been trying to build.

“If this is dedicated to any God, I pray He will forgive me. Now, if you will find that healer, my Helen, I will be glad of his good offices; my arm aches.” He leaned on her as they went down into the palace, and Kassandra looked after them with dread.

“You had better go,” said Khryse. She had not heard Khryse come back. “You are as good a healer as any in the Sun Lord’s house.”

Kassandra was not sure of that, but did not know how to say so. “You saw the wound closer than I; you know how bad it is,” he added. “I do not like such wounds even when they look harmless.” She hurried off to Paris and Helen’s chambers, only to be told that her services were not required.

That night was quiet, but in the morning the scaffolding had been raised again and the Akhaians were hammering and sawing away as if they had never been interrupted.

“Well, we’ll make short work of that, as we did yesterday,” said Deiphobos, who had come out this morning with Priam. The old man leaned heavily on his son’s shoulder. “Where’s Aphrodite’s gift to womankind this morning? Still hiding behind Helen’s frilled skirts?”

“Be quiet,” Priam said sharply. “He had a wound yesterday; perhaps it is worse or he has taken cold in it.” He summoned one of the younger messengers and said, “Go to Prince Paris if you please, and ask why he is not here with his army.”

“A wound,” said Deiphobos scornfully. “I saw that wound; a cat-scratch or, more likely, a love-bite.”

The boy hurried away and came back looking pale. He bowed to Priam and said, “My lord, the lady Helen asks that the priestess Kassandra come and look at her brother’s wound; it is beyond her power to cure.”

“My father,” Deiphobos said, “have I your leave to take out the chariots and drive off these ants as Paris did yesterday?”

“Go,” Priam said, “but when Paris is healed, you will give over command to him again; nothing that is his will ever belong to you.”

“We’ll see,” said Deiphobos. He saluted Priam and left.

Kassandra went down into the palace, through the halls which seemed, this morning, dank and cold and still, with wisps of sea-fog hanging in the air. In the rooms allotted to Paris and Helen, Paris, half-clad and very pale, was lying on a pallet, muttering. Helen, at his side, trying to bathe the wound with steaming water scented with herbs, sprang up and came to Kassandra.

“Aphrodite be praised that you have come; perhaps he will listen to you when he will not to me,” she said. Kassandra came and drew back the veil with which the wound had been covered. The whole upper arm was grossly swollen, the puncture still obstinately closed and weeping clear fluid; the arm looked purplish, with red streaks fanning down toward the wrist.

Kassandra drew breath; she had never seen an arrow wound quite like this. She said, “Have the priests of Apollo seen this?”

“They were here twice in the night. They told me to bathe it with hot water, and said it should probably be burned with a hot iron; but I had not the heart to make him suffer that, when they could not promise that it would cure him,” Helen said. “But just in the last hour he seems worse, and he does not know me now; until a few minutes ago he was yelling to the servants to bring his armor, and threatening them with a beating if they would not help him get up and put it on.”

“That is not good,” Kassandra said. “I have seen worse wounds heal, but—”

“Should I have let them burn him?”

“No; if I had been there I would have said to dress it with wine and sweet oil; and sometimes I have known a poultice of moldy bread, or of cobwebs, to cleanse a puncture wound,” she said. “The healers are too quick with their hot irons; I might have cut it last night to make it bleed more freely, but nothing more. Now it is too late. The infection has taken hold, and either he will live or he will die. But don’t despair,” she added quickly. “He is young and strong, and as I told you, I have seen worse wounds heal.”

“Is there nothing that can be done?” Helen asked wildly. “Your magic . . .”

“Alas, I have no healing magic,” Kassandra said. “But I will pray; I can do no more.” She hesitated and said, “The river priestess Oenone—she was skilled in healing magic.”

Helen sprang up in excitement.

“Can you not send for her?” she implored. “Beg her to come and heal my lord! Whatever she asks, it shall be hers; I promise it.”

But the only thing she wishes for, you have already taken from her,
Kassandra thought. She said, “I will send a message to her; but I cannot promise that she will come.”

“But if she loved him once, could she be cruel enough to refuse him her help, if it meant his death?”

“I don’t know, Helen; she was very bitter against him when she left the palace,” Kassandra said.

“If I must, I—Queen of Sparta—will kneel before her with ashes in my hair,” Helen said. “Should I go to Oenone, then?”

“No. I know her; I will go,” Kassandra said. “You pray and sacrifice to Aphrodite, Who favors you.” Helen embraced her and clung to her.

“Kassandra, surely you do not wish me evil? So many of these women of Troy hate me—I can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voices. . . .” Helen’s voice sounded almost like a pleading child’s, and Kassandra touched her cheek gently.

“I wish you nothing but good, Helen; that I swear to you,” she said.

“But when first I came to Troy you cursed me—”

“No,” Kassandra said, “I foretold truly that you would bring sorrow on us. The fact that I saw the evil does not mean that I caused it. It was the doing of the Immortals, and no more of your doing than mine. No one can escape the working of Fate. I will go now to the headwaters of the Scamander and find Oenone, and implore her to come and heal Paris.”

Khryse greeted her as she left the palace. She looked at him in surprise; this morning she had forgotten and simply taken his presence for granted.

“I thought by now you would be on a ship bound for Crete or Egypt,” she said. “Why have you not gone?”

“There may still be something I can do for the city which has sheltered me, or for Priam who has been my King,” Khryse said, “or—who knows?—even for you.”

“You should not stay for me,” Kassandra said. “I would be glad to know you are safe from what will come.”

“I want nothing,” he said in a queerly sober tone, “except that you should know at last, before the end comes for us all, that my love for you is true and unselfish, desiring nothing except your good.”

Why, that’s true,
she thought, and said gently, “I believe you, my friend; and I beg you to go to safety as soon as you can. Someone must remember and tell the truth about Troy for those who come after; it troubles me that in legends, our children’s children should come to think of Akhilles as a great hero or a good man.”

“It is not likely to do us any harm, or Akhilles any good either, whatever they may say or sing of us in times to come,” Khryse said. “Yet if I survive, I swear I will tell the truth to anyone who will listen.”

Kassandra climbed quickly to the Sun Lord’s house and took off her formal robe; she put on an old dark tunic, in which she could come and go unheeded, solid leather sandals and a heavy cloak which would keep out wind or rain. Then she went quietly out the small abandoned side gate and took the road up toward Mount Ida, along the drying stream of the Scamander. The track was beaten now into a road; many horses and men had come this way, and the water which had once run strong and clean was muddied and fouled. When last she had taken this path—how many years ago now?—the water had been clear, the path almost untrodden.

Even now, had her errand been less urgent and desperate, she would have enjoyed the journey. The sun was hidden by clouds, the tops of the tree-clad hills lost themselves in thick rolls of mist and the light winds promised rain and probably thunder. She went up quickly; but although she was a strong woman, the grade was so steep that she was soon out of breath and had to stop and rest. As she climbed, what had been a river ran thinner and clearer, and no man or horse had polluted the pathway or the water. She knelt and drank, for in spite of the clouds and wind, it was hot.

At last she reached the place where the water sprang forth from the rock, guarded by a carven image of Father Scamander. She struck the bell which summoned the river nymphs, and when a young girl appeared, asked if she might speak with Oenone.

“I think she is here,” the girl said. “Her son was ill with a summer fever; she did not go down to the sheep-shearing festival with the others.”

Kassandra had forgotten that it was so near to shearing-time.

The child went away, and Kassandra sat down on a bench near the spring and enjoyed the silence; perhaps when Honey was older she might come here to serve among the nymphs of the River God. A pleasant place for a young girl to grow up—not, perhaps, as pleasant as riding with the Amazons, but that was no longer possible. Kassandra began to understand that she had hardly begun yet to feel her grief for Penthesilea. She had been so busy with vengeance and then with other deaths that her grief had had to stand aside for more leisure to mourn.

It will be a long time before I can mourn for my brother,
she thought, and wondered what she had meant by it.

She heard a step behind her and turned; at first she hardly recognized Oenone. The slender young girl had become a tall and heavy woman, deep-breasted, her dark curls coiled low on her neck. Only the deep-set eyes were the same; but even so, Kassandra hesitated when she spoke the name.

“Oenone? I hardly recognized you.”

“No,” Oenone said, “none of us are as young and pretty as we once were. It’s the princess, is it not—Kassandra?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I have changed too.”

“You have,” Oenone said, “though you are still beautiful, Princess.”

Kassandra smiled faintly. She said, “How is my brother’s son? I hear he has been ill.”

“Oh, nothing serious—just one of those little disorders that come to children in the summer. He will be recovered in a day or two. But how may I serve you, Lady?”

“It is not for me,” Kassandra said, “but my brother Paris. He lies dying of an arrow-wound, and you have such skill in healing—will you come?”