The Firebrand Read online

  A distant muttering of thunder reverberated from far below, as if it had risen from the sea, or as if the Great Serpent who now and again caused the earth to shake might be stirring in Her depths.

  A riffle of wind stirred the light garment about Leda’s shoulders, and her hair flew wildly like a solitary bird in flight. Faint lightning suddenly flared all the courtyard alight, and silhouetted against the squared light of the doorframe she saw her husband coming in search of her. Leda shrank inwardly; would he berate her for leaving the women’s quarters, even at this hour of the night?

  But he did not speak; he only moved toward her, and something in his step, the deliberate way he moved, told the woman that despite the well-known form and the features now clearly visible in the moonlight, this was not her husband. How this could be she did not know, but around his shoulders a flicker of errant lightning seemed to play, and as he walked his foot struck the flagstones with the faintest sound of faraway thunder. He seemed to have grown taller, his head thrown back against the levin-light which crackled in his hair. Leda knew, with a shudder that bristled down the small hairs on her body, that one of the stranger Gods was now abroad within the semblance of her husband, riding him as he would mount and ride one of his own horses. The lightning-flare told her it was Olympian Zeus, controller of thunders, Lord of Lightning.

  This was nothing new to her; she knew the feel of the Goddess filling and overflowing her body when she blessed the harvests or when she lay in the fields drawing down the Divine power of growth to the grain. She remembered how she seemed to stand aside from her familiar self, and it was the Goddess who moved through the rites, dominating everyone else with the power within Her.

  Tyndareus, she knew, must now be watching from within, as Zeus, the master of his body, moved toward his wife. She knew, because Tyndareus had once told her, that of all his Gods it was for the Thunder Lord that he felt most devotion.

  She shrank away; perhaps He would not notice her and she could remain unseen until the God departed from her husband. The head that now was the God’s head moved, that flicker of lightning following the loose flying movement of his hair. She knew He had seen her; but it was not Tyndareus’ voice that spoke, but a voice deeper, softer, a profound bass rumble filled with the distant thunders.

  “Leda,” said Zeus Thunderer, “come here to me.”

  He put out His hand to take hers, and obediently, mastering the sudden inner dread—if this God bore the lightnings, would His touch strike her with the thunder-stroke? —she laid her hand in His. His flesh felt cold, and her hand shivered a little at the touch. Looking up at Him, she perceived on His face the shadow of a smile wholly unlike Tyndareus’ stern and unbending look, as if the God were laughing—no, not at her, but with her. He drew her in under His arm, casting the edge of His mantle over her, so that she could feel His body’s warmth. He did not speak again, but drew her along inside the room she had quitted only a few moments ago.

  Then He pulled her close to Him, inside the mantle, so that she could feel His manhood rising against her body.

  Do the laws against lying with any other man ban a God in my husband’s very shape and form? she wondered wildly. Somewhere inside, the real Tyndareus must be looking out at her: jealously, or pleased that his woman found favor with his God? She had no way to know; from the strength with which He held her she knew it would be impossible to protest.

  At first she had felt His alien flesh as chill; now it seemed pleasantly warm, as if fevered.

  He lifted her and laid her down; a single swift touch and somehow she was already open, throbbing and eager. Then He was over and within her, and the lightning played around His form and face, its echo deep in the pounding rhythms of His touch. For a moment it seemed that this was not a man, that in fact it was nothing human at all, but that she was alone on a great windswept height, encircled by beating wings, or a great lapping ring of fire, or as if some beast swept round her and ravished her with confusion and ecstasy—beating wings, thunder, as a hot and demanding mouth took possession of hers.

  Then suddenly it was over, as if it had been a very long time ago, a fading memory or a dream, and she was lying alone on the bed, feeling very small, chilled and abandoned and alone as the God towered over her—it seemed, to the sky. He bent and kissed her with great tenderness. She closed her eyes, and when she woke, Tyndareus was fast asleep at her side and she was not sure she had ever left her bed. It was Tyndareus; when she put out her hand to be sure, his flesh was warm—or cool—and there was not the faintest crackle of lightning in the hair that lay on the pillow beside her.

  Had she only dreamed it, then? As the thought crossed her mind, she heard from far outside the house the ripple of thunder; wherever He had gone, the God had not wholly left her. And now she knew that however long she might live with Tyndareus as his wife, she would never again look on her husband’s face without searching in it for some sign of the God who had visited her in his form.

  2

  HECUBA THE QUEEN never went outside the walls of Troy without looking back in great pride at this fortress of a city, rising up, terrace upon terrace, above the fertile plain of the green-flowing Scamander, beyond which lay the sea. She always marveled at the work of the Gods that had given her the rulership over Troy. Herself, the Queen; and Priam as her husband, warrior and consort.

  She was the mother of Prince Hector, his heir. One day her sons and daughters would inherit this city and the land beyond, as far as the eye could see.

  Even if the child whom she was soon to bear should be a daughter, Priam would have no cause to complain of her. Hector was now seven, old enough to learn arms-play. His first suit of armor had already been ordered from the smith who served the royal household. Their daughter, Polyxena, was four years old, and would someday be pretty, with long reddish hair like Hecuba’s own; one day she would be as valuable as any son, for a daughter could be married to one of Priam’s rival kings and cement a firm alliance. A king’s household should be rich with sons and daughters. The palace women had borne him many sons and a few daughters. But Hecuba, as his Queen, was in charge of the royal nursery, and it was her duty—no, her privilege—to say how every one of the King’s children should be brought up, whether born to her or to any other woman.

  Queen Hecuba was a handsome woman, tall and broad-shouldered, her auburn hair drawn back smoothly from her brow and dressed in long curls at her neckline. She walked like the Goddess Hera, carrying her child (low and near to birth) proudly before her. She wore the low-cut bodice and tiered skirt, with a pattern of brilliant stripes, that was the common dress of the noblewomen of Troy. A gold collar, as wide as the palm of her hand, gleamed about her throat.

  As she walked through a quiet street near the marketplace, a woman of the people, short and dark and coarsely dressed in earth-colored linen, darted out to touch her belly, murmuring, as if startled at her own temerity, “A blessing, O Queen!”

  “It is not I,” Hecuba responded, “but the Goddess who blesses you.” As she held out her hands, she felt above her the shadow of the Goddess, like a tingling in the crown of her head; and she could see in the woman’s face the never-failing reflection of awe and wonder at the sudden change.

  “May you bear many sons and daughters for our city. I pray you bless me also, Daughter,” Hecuba said seriously.

  The woman looked up at the Queen—or did she see only the Goddess?—and murmured, “Lady, may the fame of the prince you bear outshine even the fame of Prince Hector.”

  “So be it,” murmured the Queen, and wondered why she felt a small premonitory shiver, as if the blessing had somehow been transmuted, between the woman’s lips and her ears, into a curse.

  It must have been visible on her face, too, she thought, for her waiting-woman stepped close and said in her ear, “Lady, you are pale; is it the beginning of labor?”

  Such was the Queen’s confusion that for a moment she actually wondered if the strange sweating chill that seized her was act
ually the first touch of the birth process. Or was it only the result of that brief overshadowing by the Goddess? She did not remember anything like this with Hector’s birth, but she had been a young girl then, hardly aware of the process taking place within her. “I know not,” she said. “It is possible.”

  “Then you must return to the palace and the King must be told,” said the woman. Hecuba hesitated. She had no wish to return inside the walls, but if she was truly in labor, it was her duty—not only to the child, and to her husband, but to the King and to all the people of Troy—to safeguard the prince or princess she bore.

  “Very well, we shall return to the palace,” she said, and turned about in the street. One of the things that troubled her when she walked in the city was that a crowd of women and children always followed her asking for blessings. Since she had become visibly pregnant they begged for the blessing of fertility, as if she could, like the Goddess, bestow the gift of childbearing.

  With her woman, she walked beneath the twin lionesses guarding the gates of Priam’s palace, and across the huge courtyard behind them where his soldiers gathered for arms-drill. A sentry at the gate raised his spear in salute.

  Hecuba watched the soldiers, paired in teams and fighting with blunted weapons. She knew as much about weapons as any of them, for she had been born and raised on the plains, daughter of a nomad tribe whose women rode horseback, and trained like the men of the cities with sword and spear. Her hand itched for a sword, but it was not the custom in Troy, and while at first Priam had allowed her to handle weapons and practice with his soldiers, when she became pregnant with Hector he had forbidden it. In vain she told him that the women of her tribe rode horseback and worked with weapons until a few days before they were delivered of their children; he would not listen to her.

  The royal midwives told her that if she so much as touched edged weapons, it would injure her child and perhaps the men who owned the weapons. A woman’s touch, they said, especially the touch of a woman in her condition, would make the weapon useless in battle. This sounded to Hecuba like the most solemn foolishness, as if men feared the notion that a woman could be strong enough to protect herself.

  “But you have no need to protect yourself, my dearest love,” Priam had said. “What sort of man would I be if I could not protect my wife and child?” That had ended the matter, and from that day to this, Hecuba had never so much as touched the hilt of a weapon. Imagining the weight of a sword in her hand now, she grimaced, knowing that she was weak from women’s indoor work and soft from lack of training. Priam was not so bad as the Argive kings who kept their women confined inside their houses, but he did not really like it when she went very far outside the palace. He had grown up with women who stayed indoors at all times, and one of his most critical descriptions of a woman was “sunburnt from gadding about.”

  The Queen went through the small door into the cool shadows of the palace and along the marble-floored halls, hearing in the silence the small sound of her skirts trailing against the floor and her waiting-woman’s soft footfalls behind her.

  In her sunlit rooms, with all the curtains flung open as she preferred to keep them, her women were sunning and airing linens, and as she came through the doors they paused to greet her. The waiting-woman announced, “The Queen is in labor; send for the royal midwife.”

  “No, wait.” Hecuba’s soft but definite voice cut through the cries of excitement. “There is no such hurry; it is by no means certain. I felt strange and had no way of knowing what ailed me; but it is by no means sure it is that.”

  “Still, Lady, if you are not sure, you should let her come to you,” the woman persuaded, and the Queen at last agreed. Certainly there was no need for haste; if she was in labor there would soon be no doubt about it; but if she was not it would do no harm to speak with the woman. The strange sensation had passed off as if it had never been, nor did it return.

  The sun declined, and Hecuba spent the day helping her women fold and put away the sun-bleached linens. At sun-down Priam sent word that he would spend the evening with his men; she should sup with her women and go to bed without waiting for him.

  Five years ago, she thought, this would have dismayed her; she would not have been able to go to sleep unless she was encircled in his strong and loving arms. Now, especially this late in pregnancy, she was pleased at the thought of having her bed to herself. Even when it crossed her mind that he might be sharing the bed of one of the other women of the court, perhaps one of the mothers of the other royal children, it did not trouble her; she knew a king must have many sons and her own son, Hector, was firm in his father’s favor.

  She would not go into labor this night at least; so she called her women to let them put her to bed with the expected ceremony. For some reason the last image in her mind before she slept was the woman who had asked her for a blessing that day in the street.

  SHORTLY BEFORE midnight, the watchman outside the Queen’s apartments, drowsing on duty, was awakened by a frightful shriek of despair and dread which seemed to ring throughout the entire palace. Galvanized to full awareness, the watchman stepped inside the rooms, yelling until one of the Queen’s women appeared.

  “What’s happened? Is the Queen in labor? Is the house afire?” he demanded.

  “An evil omen,” the woman cried, “the most evil of dreams—” And then the Queen herself appeared in the doorway.

  “Fire!” she cried out, and the watchman looked in dismay at the usually dignified figure of the Queen, her long reddish hair unbound and falling disheveled to her waist, her tunic unfastened at the shoulder and ungirt so that she was half naked above the waist. He had never noticed before that the Queen was a beautiful woman.

  “Lady, what can I do for you?” he asked. “Where is the fire?”

  Then he saw an astonishing thing; between one breath and the next, the Queen altered, one moment a distraught stranger, and the next, the regal lady he knew. Her voice was shaking with fear, even though she managed to say quietly, “It must have been a dream. A dream of fire, no more.”

  “Tell us, Lady,” her waiting-woman urged, moving close to the Queen, her eyes alert and wary as she motioned to the watchman. “Go, you should not be here.”

  “It is my duty to be sure that all is well with the King’s women,” he said firmly, his eyes fixed on the Queen’s newly calm face.

  “Let him be; he is doing no more than his duty,” Hecuba told the woman, though her voice was still shaking. “I assure you, watchman, it was no more than an evil dream; I had the women search all the rooms. There is no fire.”

  “We must send to the Temple for a priestess,” urged a woman at Hecuba’s side. “We must know what peril is betokened by such an evil dream!”

  A firm step sounded and the door was thrust open; the King of Troy stood in the doorway, a tall strong man in his thirties, firmly muscled and broad-shouldered even without his armor, with dark curling hair and a neatly trimmed curly dark beard, demanding to know, in the name of all the Gods and Goddesses, what was all this commotion in his house.

  “My lord—” The servants backed away as Priam strode through the door.

  “Is all well with you, my lady?” he asked, and Hecuba lowered her eyes.

  “My lord husband, I regret this disturbance. I had a dream of great evil.”

  Priam waved at the women. “Go and be certain that all is well in the rooms of the royal children,” he commanded, and the women scurried away. Priam was a kindly man, but it was not well to cross him on the relatively rare occasions when he was out of temper. “And you,” he said to the watchman, “you heard the Queen; go at once to the Temple of the Great Mother: tell them that the Queen has had a dream of evil omen and is in need of a priestess who can interpret it to her. At once!”

  The watchman hurried down the stairs and Hecuba held out her hand to her husband.

  “It was truly no more than a dream, then?” he asked.

  “No more than a dream,” she said, but even t
he memory of it still made her shiver.

  “Tell me, love,” he said, and led her back to her bed, sitting beside her and leaning forward to clasp her fingers—hardly smaller than his own—between his callused palms.

  “I feel such a fool for disturbing everyone with a nightmare,” she said.

  “No, you were perfectly right,” he said. “Who knows? The dream may have been sent by some God who is your enemy—or mine. Or by a friendly God, as a warning of disaster. Tell me, my love.”

  “I dreamed—I dreamed—” Hecuba swallowed hard, trying to dispel the choking sensation of dread. “I dreamed the child had been born, a son, and as I lay watching them swaddle him, suddenly some God was in the room—”

  “What God?” Priam interrupted sharply. “In what form?”

  “How should I know?” Hecuba asked reasonably. “I know little of the Olympians. But I am sure I have not offended any of them nor done them any dishonor.”

  “Tell me of his form and appearance,” Priam insisted.

  “He was a youth and beardless, no more than six or seven years older than our Hector,” Hecuba said.

  “Then it must have been Hermes, the Messenger of the Gods,” Priam said.

  Hecuba cried out, “But why should a God of the Argives come to me?”

  Priam said, “The ways of the Gods are not for us to question. How can I tell? Go on.”

  Hecuba spoke, her voice still uncertain. “Hermes, then, or whichever God it may have been, leaned over the cradle, and picked up the baby—” Hecuba was white, and beads of sweat stood on her brow, but she tried hard to steady her voice. “It wasn’t a baby but—a child—a naked child, burning—I mean it was all afire and burning like a torch. And as he moved, fire came and invaded the castle, burning everywhere and striking the town . . .” She broke down and sobbed. “Oh, what can it mean?”