The Trojan War (16 page)

“Your idea of diplomacy, my child, will never cease to astound me. But make no rash vows. In the first place, you will be unable to keep them, lest they go against your inmost nature. Secondly, even if you could, I cannot break my vow, once given. This is a disability we gods suffer from. And that is why we so seldom make promises. Farewell, I shall visit you again. Try to restrain your impatience until that golden hour.”

Chryseis found his daughter, Cressida, cutting flowers in the garden. He bustled up to her.

“A very important day, my dear,” he cried. “Much business brews.”

“How is that, father?”

She was picking roses. Her slender fingers plucked and snipped, moving like white moths among the petals. Her face was flushed, making the roses look pale. Their fragrance was all about her.

“I consulted the entrails of a pigeon this morning,” he said. “A very informative set of guts. They told me that the high gods had been summoned by the Fates to read the great scroll. But there was no hint, no hint at all, of what they learned.”

“Perhaps another pigeon is on the way with this information.”

“No, no, the matter has not been published yet. That much I know. They’re being very closemouthed, the gods. I resorted to other devices. Cast dice, juggled numbers, even tried a few eastern tricks with the conjunction of the stars. But no luck at all. The gods are silent, and I don’t know what to think.”

“Well, keep eavesdropping. Perhaps you’ll hear something.”

Girls in those days were very courteous to their fathers, even while being bored.

“It’s absolutely essential that I learn something,” Chryseis went on. “For the war has come to a most important pass. Prince Achilles will undoubtedly rejoin the fray. He will seek out Hector. And upon the Dardanian plain beneath our walls the two greatest heroes on all the flat world will fight until one of them is killed. Now it is upon such days that oracles grow rich. If I could pick up even the tiniest scrap of information, I would be able to prophesy to Prince Hector concerning the duel, and he would give me splendid gifts. Yes, so noble-hearted is he, this eldest and strongest son of Priam, that he would reward even a gloomy prognostication, and if, by chance, the forecast should be happy, who knows what treasures he might heap upon me?”

Just then Cressida saw him look past her shoulder and pin a greasy, fawning smile to his face. He made a deep bow. Cressida turned. She saw Princess Cassandra, who had entered the garden so silently it was if she had been made to appear by magic.

Cassandra saw the priest’s daughter coming toward her with an armful of roses. They seemed to be little red flames. The girl was carrying a bouquet of fire. And Cassandra saw her in the midst of smoke and shrieks and falling timber offering a lover her corsage of flame. She spoke icily to quench the pain of the roses.

“Greetings, Cressida,” she said. “I do not wish to interrupt your gardening. I have come to speak with your father.”

Cressida watched her father with distaste. The man was practically jigging with pleasure and importance as he led Cassandra toward a garden seat.

“Priest,” said Cassandra. “The gods last night consulted the scroll of Fate.”

“I know, I know, good princess. So I have divined.”

“Have you divined what they were told?”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Your patron, Apollo, has told you nothing?”

“Not a word, not a word. I am hopeful of persuading him by my arts. But it takes time, time. …”

“Well, I have been told. I know now the heavy oracles concerning Troy.”

“Can you perhaps, dear Princess, find your way clear to confiding them in me?”

“No, I cannot.”

“A pity …”

“But I have not come to your garden empty-handed. I will give you a single piece of information. It concerns my brother, Hector. I tell you so that you may tell him. If I tell him, I shall of course be disbelieved.”

“In all modesty, he will believe me,” said Chryseis. “He knows that I—”

“Yes, yes … Listen closely now. For this is a conditional prophecy. If he fights Achilles, he will be killed. But Achilles cannot outlive Hector more than three days.”

“You say ‘if.’ Is it not ordained that they must fight?”

“Try to understand the way the gods entertain themselves, O oracle. There is always a margin of uncertainty injected into each edict concerning the future. That is the way the gods keep themselves in suspense about those affairs they themselves concoct, and make the spectacles more dramatic. This margin of uncertainty, this divine suspense, is called man’s will—those decisions he makes about his own affairs. ‘If,’ my friend, is a tiny word of sublime proportions. If man properly taps the explosive strength of its pent possibilities he can alter circumstances, and thrust the gods themselves into entirely new situations. The word ‘if’ heads the prophecy.
If
Hector fights, he dies.
If
Achilles kills Hector, he too dies. Make this clear to Hector. He can avoid the fight. In all honor he can do so. No one else fights Achilles. Why should he? If he avoids this duel, he will live. Go. Tell. He will reward you. Here is a gold armlet set with rubies and sapphires to pay for the time you have given me. If Hector exercises his ‘if,’ and refuses to fight Achilles, then I shall add to this armlet a fat bag of gold.”

Cassandra pulled the heavy gold circlet off her arm and gave it to Chryseis, who fell to his knees when he took it. The princess nodded to Cressida, and walked out of the garden.

As Cressida crouched again among the roses, Aphrodite now began tampering with affairs. She had come back from her session with the Fates teeming with mischief. Plan after plan for confounding the Greeks danced through her head.

“In my quiet way,” she said to herself, “it seems to me I have been much more influential than those brawling hags, Hera and Athena. After all it was my gift of Helen to Paris that started this war. And who was it that embroiled Agamemnon and Achilles, instilling in them a desire for the same slave girl? And look what that has led to. Now, however, with Patroclus dead, Achilles is sure to take the field. When he does, that mighty sword will shear through the delicate web of my contrivances. What then? All is not lost. Achilles must slay Hector if they fight, says the scroll of the Fates, but if he does, he himself must die soon afterward. If he does not combat Hector, all is as before. If he does, and they both die, then a new situation prevails. Diomedes will be the most formidable hero in the Greek camp. And I have a sharp grudge against that bully, Diomedes. Did he not dare to raise his lance against me, me, the Goddess of Love and Desire, and wound me on the wrist? Wait … here’s an idea! I can settle my grudge with him, and in doing so throw the Greek camp into turmoil again. All this, by heaven, without even making a new plan; I’ll use the old one. As I once set Agamemnon against Achilles, now, should Achilles die, I will set that Mycenean bull in murderous rivalry against Diomedes … and do it in the very same way—through Cressida, whom Agamemnon held as a slave, and whose ways intoxicated him. Now, I will infect Cressida with the sweet venom of love for Diomedes. She is already inclined that way, having watched him fight during his day of glory, and my job will be easy. Yes … I will raise admiration to a passion that will burn in her veins and melt her bones. And when she returns to Agamemnon’s tent, nothing will keep her there. It is Diomedes she will want, Diomedes she will find her way to, hurling those two chieftains at each other’s throats, dividing the Greeks into factions again, and weakening them altogether, so that they will be incapable of an assault against my Trojans.”

Thereupon she took a vial of a thick gluey red ointment that smelled of honey and baking bread—the odor of desire. Invisible, she flew to the garden of Chryseis and smeared, with this venom of desire, the thorns of the roses that Cressida was picking. The thorns pricked Cressida’s hands. Suddenly she burned for Diomedes and she knew that before the night had passed she must find a way to him.

“But will he want
me?”
she thought to herself. “He is in love with battle. Killing Trojans is his one passion. And murder is an absorbing business. Will it leave room for gentler occupations? Agamemnon I could twist around my finger. But for this Diomedes I feel a kind of terror. I must make myself irresistible to him. But how? By giving him what he wants the most. Yes … victory over the Trojans, that is what he wants the most. If I can bring him information that will help him achieve victory, then perhaps he will love me. Do I know any secrets? Nothing that is not generally known. Chitchat about the court, observations about the personal habits of Priam’s sons and daughters—these will not be useful to him. No … I need something big, important. If, for only an hour, I could be that sour-faced Cassandra with her talent for reading the future, then I could come to him filled with the authority of an oracle, a priestess of knowledge, and could make him love me. But that’s it! Cassandra! Locked in her head is what I must know. I must unlock it. But how? She despises me. Whom does she not despise? Her brother, Troilus—that’s who. She dotes on him. Watching on the wall, she has eyes only for his deeds, his safety. She would tell Troilus what I want to know. Then I must try to know Troilus a little better. It should not be difficult. He has a roving eye. It has rested on me occasionally.” And so, as we shall see, goddesses can be outwitted too. Or rather, can outwit themselves. For Aphrodite, attempting to confound the Greeks, had kindled a tiny flame that was to grow into a fire big enough to burn Troy even unto the last timber.

Chryseis visited Hector to tell him of Cassandra’s prophecy, claiming it as his own. Hector interrupted him.

“If I had any doubts about fighting Achilles,” said Hector, “I am quite rid of them now. I have always expected him to vanquish me. His pedigree is much finer than mine. He is not only the son of Thetis, queen of nereids, but great-grandson to Zeus himself. We lift our weapons against him in vain. With much pain we have learned that he cannot be hurt by spear-cast or sword-thrust. No arrow can wound him, no dart pierce his magically toughened hide. And in the use of weapons he has no equal. Yet, I have always known that I must challenge him one day, for I am the best we have, and we must counter their best with ours. To challenge him, to meet him, to pray for strength and skill somehow to pierce that invulnerable hide—to do this and then to die—this I have known to be my fate ever since Paris returned with Helen from Sparta. To meet him, to fall, and to account myself lucky to be spared the sight of Troy being sacked—that has been the best I could have hoped for. Now you tell me that my death must lead to his? And you call this a gloomy prophecy? My dear man, it is the best news I have heard in almost a decade. I just hope I can trust it. I don’t take much stock in readings of the future, you know. We have a prophetess in the family who claims to be divinely inspired, and she is invariably wrong. However, I shall do my best to believe what you tell me. Now I shall seek out Achilles with great joy. And joy strengthens a man’s arm.”

“Pray, prince Hector, consider—”

“Enough, good Chryseis. You have pleased me. Don’t spoil it. Take this bag of gold, and go. And be sure to watch from the wall tomorrow. It should be an interesting afternoon.”

A
CHILLES TOOK THE FIELD.
all aglitter he was in the new armor forged by Hephaestus. His shield burned like the sun-disk at dawn; his plumed crest burned with the colors of the sunset. Between dawn-colored shield and sunset crest his face burned white-hot as noon with pent fury. He leaped into his brass chariot and shouted to his horses. But instead of charging toward the enemy lines which they always did at the first sound of his war-shout, this time Xanthus and Balius tossed their heads, turned their long faces to him, rolling their great golden eyes.

“Pray, forgive us, master,” said Xanthus. “But one word before you go into battle.”

“It is this,” said Balius. “Do not seek Hector in single combat. If you find him, you will kill him, for no one stands before you—”

“And if you kill him,” said Xanthus, “you must die within three days, because that is the decree of the Fates.”

“I cannot believe my ears,” said Achilles. “When in the field no one questions my commands—from the lowliest Myrmidon to the most powerful member of the War Council—I am certainly not accustomed to consulting my chariot horses concerning tactics.”

“It is for love of you we speak, dear master,” said Xanthus. “Now do as you will.”

“But one favor,” said Balius. “Please leave instructions that we be burned on the same pyre as you. We do not wish to be driven by another master after your death.”

“Noted,” said Achilles. “Now be silent and obey orders. Forward!”

As Achilles took the field, Hector was being dressed for battle. Not by his squire, but by his wife, Andromache, who had begged him to let her prepare him for this day’s fighting. He had hesitated. She had been present at the conversation with Chryseis and knew the prediction about his death. But she had not said a word to dissuade him from meeting Achilles. She had saved it all up, he was afraid, for this last hour before battle. And the one thing that could weaken him, he knew, was her weeping. But she had asked to be allowed to help with his armor and he could not refuse. And now she was dressing him in the gorgeous metal that he had taken from Patroclus.

“Dear husband,” she said. “I am filled with such love and admiration that my hands tremble, and I can scarcely bind the latchets of your corselet. For in this heaven-forged armor you shine like the very morning star.”

He looked at her in amazement. No tears, no reproaches, no mournful face. She was alight with love, brimming with serenity. Never since the beginning of the war had she exuded such confidence. He did not question her, but accepted her mood with glad heart. He would have felt differently perhaps had he known how she had arrived at her present mood. But it was a secret he was never to learn.

The night before, Andromache had left Hector’s bed. She wrapped herself in a dark cloak and made her way through the sleeping city. Mounting the inner steps to the wall and keeping to the deepest shadows, she avoided the sentry and climbed down the other side of the wall. There she crossed the Dardanian plain to a bend of the river called Scamander. Now she unwrapped her cloak, pulled her gown over her head and stood naked, white as a birch, in the moonlight. She stepped into the river up to her knees.