Not long ago, for a few brief hours, the Trojan Queen had lain beside her husband in a dream of unexpected peace. Now the world had turned into a phantasmagoria around her aged head and so intense was the feeling of nightmare, so violent the alteration in her circumstances, that she could no longer trust the evidence of her senses. It was impossible that Priam lay dead with his regal head severed from his body. It was impossible that these streets and squares, which only a few hours earlier had been filled with thankful prayers and jubilant with revelry, should now echo to the brutal shouts of foreign voices and the anguish of her frightened people. It was impossible that the bronze helmets and armour of the soldiers dragging her away were anything other than the figments of a dream. Yet she knew from their gaping eyes and mouths that her womenfolk were screaming round her and, after a time, Queen Hecuba came to understand that she too was keening out loud with all the strength of her lungs.
Lifted by the breeze from the burning buildings in the city below, smoke gusted across the square so that the staring head and arched neck of the wooden horse seemed to rise out of fog. The women were left coughing as they moaned. Spectral in the gloom, their faces blemished by the streaks of paint running from their eyes, they looked more like creatures thrown up from the underworld than the graceful ladies of royal Troy they had been only an hour earlier. Then they were screaming again as the armoured figure of the herald Talthybius strode out of the torchlit smoke. He was clutching the slender, half-naked figure of Cassandra by the arm.
The girl’s eyeballs had turned upwards and she was singing to herself, not for comfort but in a crazy kind of triumph. Hecuba recognized the words from the Hymn to Athena. As though unconscious of the terror around her, Cassandra was singing of how, when the armed goddess sprang with gleaming eyes from the head of Zeus, all the gods had been awe-struck and the earth itself had cried out and the seas had stood still.
Pushed out of the swirl of smoke into the throng of women, Cassandra too might have sprung in that eerie moment from some unnatural source. But the suave pragmatist Talthybius had his attention elsewhere. Seeing Hecuba shivering in the night air, he berated their guards for putting the health of these valuable captives at risk. He ordered one of them to raid the nearest house for throws and blankets before the women caught their death of cold. Then he turned to confront the Trojan Queen where she stood with the cloth of her gown hanging open to reveal her depleted breasts.
‘Forgive me for not observing your plight earlier, madam. The guards should have shown greater courtesy. But I beg you to calm these women.’ Talthybius raised both his staff and his voice to silence the captives. ‘The High King himself has commanded that you be brought here to safety and kept under guard. No harm will come to any of you. You have my word on that.’
‘No harm!’ Hecuba’s thin grey hair had come unbound. It was blowing about her face like rain in wind. ‘You think it no harm to see our men struck down? You think it no harm to watch our city burn?’
‘Such are the fortunes of war.’ The herald glanced away from the accusation of her eyes. ‘Your husband would have done well to think of this when he threw our terms for peace back in our teeth all those years ago.’
‘Do not dare to speak of my husband, Argive. The gods will surely avenge what has been done to him.’
‘Isn’t it already clear that the gods have set their faces against Troy?’ Talthybius sighed. ‘Be wise and endure your fate with all the fortitude you can.’
Reaching out to take Cassandra into the fold of her arm, Hecuba said, ‘The Queen of Troy has no need of Agamemnon’s lackey to teach her how to grieve.’
‘The Troy you ruled has gone for ever, madam,’ the herald answered. ‘You are Queen no longer. When this night’s work is done, you and your kinswomen will be divided by lot among the Argive captains. I pity your condition but things will go easier with you if you school yourself in humility.’
‘Do as you like with me,’ Hecuba defied him. ‘My life ended when I saw Hector fall. It was only a ghost of me that watched my husband die. What remains here is less than that. Your captains will find no joy in it.’
Talthybius shrugged. ‘It may be so. But I give Cassandra into your care. Be aware that my lord Agamemnon has already chosen her for his own.’
‘To be at the beck and call of his Spartan queen?’
‘To be the companion of his bed, madam.’
Hecuba looked up at him with flashing eyes. ‘I would strangle her with my own hands first.’
But at that moment Cassandra reached her fingers up to her mother’s face and held it close to her own. She was smiling the demented smile that Hecuba had long since learned to dread. ‘You have not yet understood,’ she whispered. ‘This is what the goddess wants of me. I have seen her. I saw her in the moments when they sought to ravish me beneath her idol. Divine Athena came there to comfort me. She told me I would be married to this Argive king. She told me that we must light the torches and bring on the marriage dance, and go joyfully to the feast. So that is what we will do. And you too must dance, mother. You must dance with me. Come, weave your steps with mine. Let us rejoice together and cry out evan! evoe! And dance to Hymen and Lord Hymenaeus at the wedding feast,’ – her voice dipped to a whisper that the herald could not hear – ‘for Athena has promised me that this marriage will destroy the House of Atreus.’
And then, as Hecuba looked on in dismay, Cassandra broke free of her grasp and began to stamp her foot and clap her hands above her bare shoulder, crying out to the bewildered Trojan women to join her in the dance and honour the husband who would shortly share her marriage bed.
‘Look to your daughter, madam,’ Talthybius warned. ‘I fear she is not in her right mind.’ Then, commanding the guards to keep a watchful eye on both women, the herald left the square to go in search of his master.
Slowly the hours of that terrible night dragged past. The women trembled and wept together. As if drugged on her own ecstasy, Cassandra slept. Exhausted and distraught, her throat hoarse from wailing, her breasts bruised where she had pummelled them in her grief, Hecuba entered a trance of desolation in which it seemed that no more dreadful thing could happen than she had endured already. And then Hector’s widow, Andromache, was brought through the gloom.
Hecuba did not see her at first because her eyes were fixed on the twelve year old warrior Neoptolemus, who strode ahead of Andromache wearing the golden armour that had once belonged to his father Achilles. The last time she had seen this ferocious youth he had been standing over Priam’s body looking down in fascination as blood spurted from the severed arteries of the neck. Still accompanied by his band of Myrmidons, Neoptolemus was carrying his drawn sword but he had taken off his helmet so that for the first time Hecuba could see how immature his features were. Only a faint bloom of blond hair softened his cheeks, and the eyes that surveyed the captive women were curiously innocent of evil. They were like the eyes of a child excited by the games.
Unable to endure the sight of him, Hecuba glanced away and saw Andromache held in the grip of two Myrmidon warriors. It was obvious from her distracted eyes and the uncharacteristic droop of her statuesque body that they were there to support rather than restrain her. The women of Hector’s house followed behind, weeping and moaning. Evidently hysterical with terror, the body-servant Clymene seemed scarcely able to catch her breath as she gripped and tore the tangles of her hair.
Neoptolemus gestured with his sword for the women in his train to be brought forward and herded with the others. But when Hecuba held out trembling hands to receive Andromache into her arms she was appalled to see her daughter-in-law stare back at her without recognition through the eyes of a woman whose memory was gone.
Though Andromache said nothing Hecuba could hear her breath drawn in little panting gasps as though she was sipping at the air. Her cheeks and throat were lined with scratches where she had dragged her fingernails across the surface of the flesh. A bruise discoloured the skin around the orbit of her right eye, and there was such utter vacancy in the eyes themselves that Hecuba knew at once that this woman