maynads asked:
Your posts on Helen are absolutely amazing and so informative!! On that note - could you share your views on Cassandra of Troy?
Apollo, Apollo!
Leader of journeys, my destroyer!
All this way you have led me,
to destroy me again?
The queen Clytemnestra stands before the doors of Argos’ tall royal slaughterhouse. Her hands stink red.
Cassandra stumbles forward, to that woman who is false honey and full-nerved hate, and an image of her death rears up before her: smile of axe-edge, crack and blood-bloom. There is no swerving from it—the sight unstoppers her throat and she retches gouts of prophecy, and knows she is not heard.
The killing queen calls her in. To the east the sky is on fire, and fate is the silver tremor of her heart.
In her seventh year, the king and queen take their godstruck daughter to the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo. At dawn she is found sleeping in the coils of snakes, her ears licked clean to hear the voice of the god.
No woman was ever so young a priestess. She kneels at prayer in his temple, O Apollo Apollo, and the god climbs down from the sky. He is glory; he draws her face up with hot hands.
He says, I will give you fate’s far-seeing eyes.
Yes, she says, rising. Yes.
She is sun-struck, brimming with radical light that pours down her backbone and through all the deep of her. But when the bright god presses his body to her and his fingers scorch at the hollow of her throat, she drives him back. Then darkly he draws himself up, prideful and savage, and he spits in her mouth.
Treacherous woman. A hissing like wildfire. Yours will be a lunatic tongue.
Cassandra runs, across the plain that will swell with nameless graves. For a moment she sees flames as tall as sails, feeding on the walls of Troy.
She dreams of white ships on the horizon’s knife. A girl gowned for a wedding is hoisted up for slaughter. Soldiers clash in octaves of havoc. Sun-sucked streets run black with gore.
She tells of this ruin but no one heeds her. She rages—why are you not afraid—and begs her family to listen, but they hear only shriller delirium. She shouts in the streets and the people whisper fool, fanatic; they call her mad and devil-stolen.
When she will not be consoled she is shut in a house like a tomb. Apollo has made her a monster, an exile of the grey place that is called to apeiron—the unbounded, the place of wolves.
Her brother Paris comes to her bedchamber where she weaves. Bound for Achaea, he is fair and strong in light-licked armour, and calamity lies like a shadow on his shoulders. He stoops to kiss her brow. There is a knife hidden in her sleeve, but she cannot bear to cut that fateful horizon into his throat.
His ship sets sail. Cassandra dreams of a horse with a bellyful of iron maggots, and her brother’s eyes when he is dead.
From her window she hears the covenants of duskbirds, the golden city in soft repose. It all burns.
She warned until her voice gave way. She took axe and torch and set upon the great horse, to kill what lurked there. The king’s men prisoned her in the dark with Apollo’s laughter and the city was slaughtered as it slept.
In the years of siege she saw augury’s shadows come again as sound and flesh: Andromache, dull-staring, dragged away by her hair; Hector, faceless, his funeral shroud dust and clotted blood; Paris, so fair, with an arrow through his throat; her father, slumped over a shattered altar; her mother, a slave for Odysseus; her youngest sister, bled like an animal on the grave of Achilles.
Now she goes foot by foot through the streets of ash and fume and sword-shriek, treading over carcasses.
The conquerors find her, and she will not be silent. A foreign soldier, death-drunk, sprawls her on the floor of Athena’s temple and lurches over her, and she roars out his fate—for this, the goddess will swell a storm and crack his ship and his bones on the rocks of Euboea.
Her body is hefted away by soldiers. At the brink of her hearing—thunder.
Agamemnon, king, keeps her chained in his tent as he gloats over the spoils of felled and gutted Troy. He calls for prophecy and laughs at her raving.
She sees pyres of bodies unseamed by swords, Dardanian captives crying in and out of speech. The sky is deaf to prayers—it sends only carrion birds, who bear no missives and squabble among the butchered. She is a witness, hollowed but for her rage.
The king lies beside her in glutted beast-sleep and she whispers his death: the queen with red hands, the lioness crouched in long shadows.
The king’s longships set sail. She leans over the edge, with her loosed hair and her mouth salt-limned, and watches the billowing and glister of waves, the shadows beneath mosaic light.
Her belly is swollen. She knows them, her sons: crooked laugh; steady and devoted hands. She gives birth to them on the deck, the sun sweltering on her body. With every agony she curses Apollo.
Later, under mute stars, her children lie stirring in the vigil of her arms and she sings to them of a city no longer alive. They do not hear madness, only the soft and breaking swell of her voice.
When the ship lands on Argos, the children are torn from her. She thought herself iron-proofed against pain, but the sounds from her throat are not human.
Agamemnon hails his queen, and in her smile there is the shadow of her smile, the bladed gleam Cassandra dreamt. In her hands there is death.
Cassandra wakes in the dim place at the rim of the earth. Around her thronging dead glimmer up, their mouths ajar. They are gentle.
Apollo trespasses there, too bright to bear. He kneels before her. He is violent glory and his eyes shine, void.
I loved you ever, he says.
She is yet his prophet: in an awful voice she tells him of the mortals he will love till they are burned inside-out, and his deathless grief. Shaken, he leads her out of that dark.
The sun, slanted in hazy carnival, laps at the hem of her dress. Her god offers her the sky but she does not heed him—she has already turned away.
He lets her go, a wolf beyond light’s coveting hands.
Cassandra walks in the ungolden ruins of Troy, and sings of the world to come.
#maynads #mythology #cassandra of troy #(yes that numbering is deliberate) #there are figures in greek mythology i love #and then there's cassandra #whose story is more important to me than any other #and yet it's always shrunk to a footnote in other stories easier to swallow #i'm writing this on a train and now i have to get off the train #when i get home i'll probably despair of how rough and weird this is #this is a war story it's brutal in parts #rape tw #gore tw #emetophobia tw #things i wrote #and set my teeth in the silver of the moon
