Читать книгу The Windswept City - Henry Treece - Страница 6

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The palace was very dark and still. No guards stood on the great steps that led up through the porch into the vestibule. They would be wrapped in their cloaks, sitting by a brazier at the side of the great hall, he thought. It was such a chilly night.

In the vestibule three women in black robes were chanting and throwing herbs onto a little fire. They had white ash on their heads and were mourning for someone. Asterius thought it must be one of the Trojan lords who had been ambushed a few days before. Someone was always being ambushed, and Troy was full of priestesses who wore ash on their heads and wailed around fires at night. Asterius did not like to look at them, or to have them look at him. Often they daubed white clay over their faces, and painted streaks of blue or black across their cheeks when they were making offerings, and this sent a shiver down his back.

So he ran past them as quietly as he could and along the corridor. Halfway down, a tall guard with a spear stepped out from behind some hangings and pushed Asterius against the cold stone wall. “Where are you going?” he said fiercely.

Asterius said, “Let me through, Atabyrius, I must speak to my mistress.”

The guard tugged at the boy’s ear and said, “How do I know you are not a Greek spy with a dagger hidden under your tunic?”

Asterius pulled away from him. “Don’t be a fool, Atabyrius,” he said. “You know very well who I am.”

The guard pretended to be very serious and shook his head. He said, “I know someone who looks a bit like you, a young fellow named Asterius. But an old soldier like me knows better than to let every young fellow go running through the palace because he looks like Asterius. I think you are a spy, disguised to look like Asterius. That’s what I think.”

Asterius said, “Well, you can soon find out the truth, because my mistress, the lady Helen, is standing right behind you and she will say who I am.”

Atabyrius swung around and bowed his head—but, of course, there was no one behind him. And when he realized this, it was too late, because Asterius had dodged around him and was racing along the passageway.

The guard watched him go, then turned back to his post and began to whistle softly to himself to pass the time away.

Asterius ran around two bends in the corridor and then had to pass across an upper courtyard in the middle of which stood an enormous bronze bull with eagle’s wings. He had always been afraid of it. The dark metal gleamed a reddish color in the glow of the tripod fires that stood about it. The bull’s eyes seemed to glare as though it were alive. Asterius was edging away from the creature when a woman suddenly came from behind the pedestal and stood in his way. She was wearing a rumpled woolen gown and her face was thin and pale. Over her uncombed dark hair she wore a black cloth.

Asterius bowed his head before her because she was one of the royal house. He said, “Greetings, my lady Cassandra, daughter of King Priam. I hope you are well.”

The princess gazed at him out of her wide dark eyes and said, “No one is well in Troy, slave. In this doomed city no one will ever be well again. Apollo has spoken to me in my dreams and has told me the end of all things. And it will be a terrible end.”

Asterius hated to meet Cassandra in the dark passageway because she always said things like this. He did not know how to speak to her, but he smiled and said, “It is wintertime, my lady, and we are all sad until the spring comes, shut up here in the palace. We shall feel better when the sun is warm again and we can go out.”

Cassandra took hold of a lock of his black hair and twisted it in her long white fingers. Then she said, “Troy is doomed. We shall never see the sun again, boy. We shall all die up here on this hill before the summer comes again.”

This made Asterius angry. In the stables there was a lovely horse called Hippomedon that belonged to Helen, and the boy planned to ride over the plains on this horse as soon as the weather got better. He said, “Very well, lady, if you are so certain that Troy is doomed, why do you not tell your father, King Priam? Why do you not tell your mother, Queen Hecabe, or your great warrior brothers, Hector and Paris? You could even tell your warrior cousin, Aeneas. Then they could do something about it.”

Suddenly Cassandra took him by the hand and drew him toward the pedestal above which the bronze bull towered. “Sit with me a little while,” she said. “Do not be afraid; I am not mad, in spite of what the slave women say about me.”

Asterius felt himself blushing because he had heard the slave women saying this many times. But he did not dare to answer. Then Cassandra said, quite softly and in such an ordinary voice that she might have been talking about a new dress she was having woven at the looms, or a new pair of sandals made at the palace workshops, “Asterius, Apollo put a curse on me long ago and it is this: I am fated to see the truth of things and to foretell the future, but no one will ever believe me. Is that not a heavy burden to carry through life?”

Asterius scratched his neck and said, “Hector would believe you. Hector is the greatest warrior the world has ever known. There is no man who could stand against him, he is so big and strong, so skilled with his weapons. A hero like that would listen to you and would save Troy.”

All at once he felt something wet on his arm. He looked up and saw that Cassandra was leaning over and weeping. He said, “My lady, have I made you cry? I am sorry. Was it because I spoke of Hector? Why should you cry because you have a hero as a brother, lady?”

Suddenly Cassandra looked up at him and he backed away from her. He had never seen her eyes look so wide and staring, or her mouth so twisted. He felt quite sure that she was about to put a spell on him, so he bowed hurriedly then turned and almost fled to the high gallery that looked down over the great hall. He had hoped to find Helen there, perhaps walking alone and singing, but when he looked into the vast echoing space, he saw that the royal kindred were gathered in the hall, as though for some solemn occasion. He did not dare break the silence, but gazed at them in awe.

King Priam sat in a high-backed chair of Libyan ebony, his long bronze sword across his knees. He was an old man now, and his hair and beard were thin and white. His shoulders were stooped under his heavy purple cloak, and his hands seemed to shake like aspen leaves all the time. But his dark eyes were still bright and his hooked nose curved like the beak of an eagle. And when he spoke, his voice was as firm as ever.

Beside his chair, one to left and one to right, stood his great sons, Hector and Paris. Hector seemed immense in his bronze corselet molded with the shapes of leaping stags. His arms, in their gold bracelets, looked like the branches of oak trees, all covered with curly golden hairs. In the torchlight from the sconces set along the wall, Asterius saw Hector’s light gray eyes that never missed anything, his straight and narrow nose, his close-cropped curly hair that looked like fine bronze itself. He thought that, but for the sword scars across his face, Hector would be as handsome as a god, as handsome as Apollo himself, perhaps.

But not Paris. He was smaller and much darker, and very restless in all his movements—not steady and firm as a warrior should be. Paris was more like a slinger or an archer, not like the highest class of warrior who used the sword and the javelin. Asterius wondered why all the women seemed to like Paris better than Hector. He wondered why Helen, his own mistress, had ever left her kingdom of Sparta to come with Paris to live in windswept Troy.

Then, in the gloom, he picked out Helen. She sat on a lower step, beneath the throne chair, next to Queen Hecabe, whose gray hair was covered with a brown shawl and whose old fingers turned continuously at a bone spindle from which the gray wool hung down. Helen did not seem to be very interested in what was going on. She seemed to be smiling at some thought or other in her own head. Asterius wondered why all the poets said she was so beautiful. Of course he liked her, because she was as kind to him as a mother, or an older sister; but that did not make her beautiful. Long ago, when she had first left her husband Menelaus and her baby daughter Hermione to sail to Troy with Paris, she might have been beautiful, for all Asterius knew; but that was ten years ago. Why, he thought, she must be very old now—she must be nearly thirty.

In the dim torchlight of the hall he thought that her famous golden hair looked faded and dry, and her face thin and sharp. He could see the lines on it when the light caught her from a certain direction. And she frowned too much, which made lines on her brow, and drew her lips downward, which made her look spiteful and shrewish.

Of course her dress was splendid, with all its embroidery in gold and silver threads, and the great diadem she wore, with masses of gold beads hanging down on either side of it, would have bought a whole fleet of ships, or a thousand horses. But that didn’t make her beautiful, he thought. Not as beautiful as the poets said.

Then he suddenly felt very mean for thinking these things, because she was the kindest person he had ever known since his parents had died and he was sold into slavery.

He was about to creep away and to dare passing through the Bull Court again when King Priam suddenly spoke up in a loud and angry voice.