Cassandra. Kerry Greenwood

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СКАЧАТЬ soldiers. I saw them. Bronze men. They shone in the sun.'

      `Glittering. Their helmets are made in the shapes of beasts.'

      `Beast men, with a beast god.'

      Open-mouthed, Eleni and I kissed. Salt with tears, the kiss was harsh, bitter as the embrace of the shipwrecked we sometimes found on the shore, arms around each other, dying mouth locked to mouth.

      We slept again after a little while. We did not dream again, and we did not tell anyone about the vision, not at the time. It seemed too strange, too horrible. We should have gone to the temple and told the priest of Apollo about it. He sent the dream, straight and wounding as an arrow, poisoning our sleep and stirring our passion.

      We were woken by Hector, calling us to come down to the harbour with him. We dragged on our tunics and found our sandals and ran past Nyssa, who was telling us to wash our faces, and scaled Hector like a wall.

      He laughed - we could feel his bass laugh through his embrace - and perched us one on each shoulder. We were high up and perfectly safe - Hector would never let us fall - and we grabbed a handful of his coarse, pale hair as we jolted down the steep street which led to the Scamander Gate. We crossed the Place of Strangers' Gods and Hector set us down while he mounted his horse, then we scrambled up and clung to him, one each side, like the monkeys that Theones the shipmaster had brought back from the coasts of the strange land where the men were black and the forests yielded gold. Hector's eyes were grey and they twinkled. He never teased and he always let us come with him.

      `What was wrong with you, twins?' he asked, hugging Eleni closer as he seemed likely to fall off. `I heard you crying.'

      `Eleni looked at me round the bulk of our brother's torso. I shook my head. I did not want to tell. `Just a bad dream,' said Eleni. `We had a bad dream. Where are we going?'

      `Down to the harbour - two ships have come in from Kriti. Wine for the king, finest olive oil for the perfumers, and...' he paused, smiling.

      `Honey for the twins!' we chorused, greedily.

      Our brother Hector was as tall as a tree, as strong as a bull, massive and gentle. He could throw a spear further than anyone else, tame the wildest horse with words and touch, leap like a deer and fight like a lion. What foe, what demon, could overcome Hector our brother?

      He was our best source of stories. Hector knew everything.

      The first story I remember he told us, we must have been four or five years old. We were lying on the flat roof of the palace. The palace is a rambling, three-storeyed building, the finest in Troy. It occupies the highest point. The Achaeans would call it an acropolis. When we came here from the Island, we built flat roofs, and although the newer houses have sloping roofs which drain better, the palace is the oldest building in Troy.

      Hector was lying on his cloak, the purple himation of the prince of Ilium. All the royal house were dressed in purple, derived from boiling murex shells. We were not allowed to go down by the dyers because of the dreadful smell, so it became a fascinating and forbidden place, and we went there when we could, although Nyssa always knew because of the stink and because our feet were dyed by contact with the running gutters. Then she scrubbed us with soapleaf and pumice stone and scolded all the while.

      We never minded Nyssa scolding. We learned a lot of new words. The only way she could effectively punish us was to separate us - we were proof against spanking and words ran off us like water off a turtle's shell. But when separated we cried so lamentably, and above all so loudly, that she always relented after about an hour and put us back together again. Whereupon we would cease crying instantly and embrace and then think of something even more wicked to do. Poor Nyssa - we led her a trying life.

      Eleni and I were lying either side of Hector, resting our chins on his chest. He was broad shouldered, our brother, and we liked the way the muscles moved under his skin when he breathed. He was as golden as a lion, with a mane of bright hair and a bristly golden beard as thick as twigs at the roots. His hands were big, with golden hair on the back, which I liked to tug at, and his arms were massive and bound with gold bracelets. He wore a pale green tunic of the cloth which came out of Egypt and was called linen. They make it out of reeds.

      He had laid aside the pot of ink which he always wore on his neck, with the scribe's pen in it, and the scroll of Egyptian papyrus to make notes on. Our brother made notes about everything. He was the arranger of the city, the king our father's right hand. Hector knew, to a bale, how much wool we had sold to Phrygia; how much amber and tin bought from Caria; and how much pottery and how many necklaces from Achaea, down to the last and tiniest bead. He knew how many horses were in any of the king's herds, their breeding, their increase and their value as chariot horses or plough beasts. Hector had at his little finger's end more knowledge of the people of Troy, their trades, their occupations, and their private lives, than all of Priam's sons who sailed and traded across the Pillars of Heracles and up and down the shoreless sea.

      They said in the city that he had numbered the winds and counted the tides, and they laughed at him, though carefully and out of earshot. They might curse his name and his family all the way back to Dardanus, as they searched a hold for a forgotten ingot or accounted for a lost sheep eaten by wolves the previous winter, but they trusted him, and he was very strong, a mighty warrior when there was cause. Was it not Hector Cuirass of Troy who had led a charge against the Mycenaean pirates who had landed and sacked a village, killing them to the last man?

      Lying on Hector's chest was his cat, a creature called Státhi, or `ash' because of the colour of his fur. He was a gift from a grateful priestess in the Nile delta, from a place called Bubastis. We did not ask what she was grateful for and Hector never told us. Státhi was the first cat we had ever seen in the fur. He was about the same size as a small dog, though dogs were terrified of him, and he had thick, deep velvety fur, ash-coloured and barred with black like burned wood. His eyes were leaf green and cool. Hector had been given him as a small cub, and had carried him in his tunic against his heart for the length of the voyage, afraid that such a small creature might die of cold. Thereafter Státhi considered Hector the only human worth noticing - I think he thought our brother was a large furless cat - and was distant with all others, if not hostile. Once Eleni and I had pulled his tail and been swiftly punished for our impudence with a hand each sliced across with talons as sharp as a hawk's. We had not noticed that Státhi had claws - he kept them concealed in his paws - and we were much astonished and had howled. Hector had not been sympathetic.

      `Státhi is a divine creature, the servant of a goddess,' he had reproved us. `You must expect to be hurt if you provoke him.'

      Státhi had never seemed like a servant to us. He had a royal, arrogant leisure in all his movements. When the palace dogs attacked him in a body, barking at this strange new creature, he called upon his lady and she doubled his size, endowing him with eyes that glowed like embers and teeth of strongest ivory. She had also given him a scream which rose from a growl to a shriek, a voice that summoned all within hearing to the rescue.

      Not that he needed rescue. The dogs, thoroughly unnerved, decided that there were other things that urgently needed their attention and thereafter left him severely alone. He still occasionally slapped an intrusive nose with his thorned paw, just to remind them that a goddess' friend was present, and they always retreated, howling. Státhi would sometimes allow a caress from someone other than Hector, and Eleni and I loved to stroke his velvety fur. But he would endure the caress rather than enjoy it, and when he was tired of the touch he would turn and bite, hard. The city called him `Hector's shadow' because, unless he had important business in the palace kitchens, he was always at the prince's heels, an aloof and mystical being, interested in everything, following his own purposes.

      Hector СКАЧАТЬ