Glyn Iliffe - The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

‘Protect your follower, Apheidas, son of Polypemon,’ she said. ‘Watch over him in battle. And aid him in this task he has taken upon himself, about which he keeps his own counsel but which he says is for the glory and preservation of Troy.’

She lowered the blade to the neck of the snake.

‘And I call on you to speak to me, lord. Enter me. Fill me with your presence and guide my inner eye. Show me the things I seek, show me how I, too, can protect Troy from the wolves at her gates. Lord of the bow and the lyre, show me and don’t spare me, even if I have to cross into the realms of madness to witness these things. Let me know what must be done to save my city.’

She pressed the knife against the snake’s skin, feeling the momentary tension as the scales resisted and then gave. The blade slid quickly through the flesh to the unyielding stone. Dark blood poured over the pale altar and, stopping her thumb over as much of the wound as it would cover, Cassandra hastily lifted the severed body to her raised lips. The warm liquid filled her mouth and spilled over her chin and neck to spatter her white robes. She squinted against the coppery taste and stumbled backwards, releasing the dead snake and the knife as she fell to one knee. She slumped forward onto her knuckles and her black hair fell over her face like a curtain, hiding the mixture of revulsion and fear on her features. Her heart was beating faster now, knowing from long experience that she had but moments left in the waking world, moments in which her mind remained connected to her body and could feel, smell, hear, taste and see the temple around her.

And then it came.

She was thrown onto her back. Her wide eyes stared up at the ceiling of dark leaves traced with silver. Then there was a rush of light as if the moon had expanded to a hundred times its own size, filling the temple and swamping her retinas with whiteness. At the same time, the gentle rustling of the wind grew to a roar like the sound of a monstrous wave rolling towards her. The cold night air bit into her flesh with the intensity of fire, burning her nerve endings and arching her back until, with a scream, she felt her conscious mind ripped from her body and pulled upward through the branches of the temple into the cloudless, moon-dominated sky. She continued to ascend, glimpsing the Scamander and the dark mass of Troy to her right, while away to her left was the semicircular wall of the Greek camp with the beetle-like hulls of their thousand ships blackening the shoreline. Then she was plunging forward, not by her own will but drawn inexorably on towards the great, glittering blanket of the ocean, until she was leaving Ilium behind and soaring over the waves at a height that made the islands below appear like stepping stones. Formless in her flight, as if she were a ghost rushing on its way to the eternal halls of Hades, she could neither feel the wind that herded skeins of cloud across the face of the moon, nor hear its roar filling her ears; neither could she taste the dampness in the air, nor smell the cold clarity of the night. But she could see. Like a great eye she could see far and wide, all the way back to Ilium – already in the dim distance behind her – and beyond. To the north she saw the mountainous lands of Troy’s former rivals, before the Greeks had come and Priam had bought their allegiance. South, she could see the country of Egypt, even though it was many days journey by ship and several weeks on foot. Yet it was towards the west, to the never-before-seen land of her enemies, that her mind was focussed.

The gods had shrouded Greece in cloud, but beneath its tattered edges she glimpsed mountains and valleys, rugged and beautiful, dotted throughout with white-walled cities and towns that slumbered peacefully in the darkness. This was the cradle of the fleet that had brought so much destruction to her homeland, and she felt nothing but revulsion as it came rapidly closer. Then the sea was gone and she fell through the clouds to skim bird-like across the land below. Now she could see orchards and vineyards; ramshackle villages and hillside enclosures half-filled with sheep; roads left unguarded by abandoned watchtowers, from which the soldiers had long since been called to war. She passed a city nestled beneath two mountain peaks and felt a surge of black fear at the sight of it, but before it could overwhelm her she had moved on, over more mountains and plains until she saw a river below, its surface shining like glass as the moon broke momentarily free of the clouds. She followed its course and saw a high mound that she instinctively knew was the barrow of a long-dead warrior, and without any lessening of speed plunged towards it. If she had possessed hands to throw before her face, or a mouth with which she could have screamed, she would have; but there was no sense of impact as she passed into the barrow, or of having come to a stop as she found herself inside the high-ceilinged chamber beneath. Though there was no light in the tomb, she could see a sarcophagus before her with the carved figure of a horse above it. Inside was a bone, one of many that made up the giant skeleton of a man, but this single shoulder blade was starkly white – made of ivory, the work of the gods. Briefly she wondered why she had been brought here, and immediately she knew that this was one of the answers that she had sought. A voice spoke the name of the man whose tomb this was, and she understood at once that unless the Greeks took the ivory shoulder blade from the sarcophagus the walls of Troy would never fall.

Then she was free of the chamber and returning east, moving through the air at great speed until the clouds opened to reveal a large island far below her. She saw a palace on top of a hill overlooking the main harbour, and as her mind’s eye descended to enter its empty halls she wondered what the significance of the island was and why Apollo had brought her here. Then a vision of a great warrior appeared, dressed in magnificent armour that she had seen once before from the walls of Troy. The helmet was gold with a red plume, the breastplate shaped in the perfect likeness of a man’s torso, and the shield had seven concentric circles filled with figures that moved as if alive. The armour had been made by Hephaistos, the smith-god, for Achilles. But Achilles was dead, his ashes buried beneath a barrow on the plains of Ilium. And then she understood the meaning of the revelation. The warrior in the armour was to take Achilles’s place on the battlefield; without him, the Greeks would return home defeated.

She turned from the terrible vision and found herself crossing the Aegean once more, hurtling back to Ilium and the temple of Thymbrean Apollo. But the oracles of Troy’s doom were not yet over. As she hung over the circle of plane trees, expecting at any moment to be reunited with her physical self, she looked across the Scamander to the great city with its high walls and towers and its gates that had withstood the might of Agamemnon’s army for ten years. And then the sloped battlements began to shake and crumble. The towers fell and the gates were torn from their mountings, while in the city behind the buildings caved in on themselves in clouds of dust. People were running everywhere, their screams unheard by her sealed ears as they were crushed by falling stones or disappeared into the chasms that were opening beneath their feet. Cassandra wanted to cry out in terror but was unable to make a sound, as the mound that Troy was built on started to rise up, like a monstrous subterranean creature waking from centuries of slumber, destroying the city on its back as it came to life. And as Troy disintegrated and was gone, all that remained was the mound – higher and blacker and smoother than Cassandra had ever known it before, and yet strangely familiar. It was then that she recognised it. The Palladium, the wooden effigy that stood in the temple of Athena in the citadel of Pergamos. Legend said that it was an image of Athena’s friend, Pallas, whom the goddess had accidentally killed. It had fallen from heaven when the city was being built and had landed in the unfinished temple, a sign of the goddess’s divine protection. Without it, Troy was doomed to fall.